Pitch to Reality
I have created fantastical virtual worlds for clients, taking them into spaces that did not yet exist and allowing them to experience something we were proposing to make real. I still find the technology extraordinary. There is something wonderful about standing inside an idea that has only recently existed in someone's imagination, watching people move through it and begin to understand what it might become.
The excitement can be infectious. The client is astonished and the people who have created the presentation are often just as impressed by what they have achieved. I certainly have been. The atmosphere feels real, the scale is convincing and for a moment everyone shares the sensation of having experienced something that has not yet happened.
That ability to communicate an ambition is immensely valuable. It gives people confidence to support work that might otherwise be difficult to imagine. It can also create an expectation so convincing that the presentation begins to acquire a life of its own. Long before the event takes place, people have already formed a memory of what they believe they are going to experience.
The excitement rarely ends with the first presentation. A creative director shows the animation to another stakeholder, who is equally impressed and shares it with someone else. The virtual world begins travelling through an organisation, gathering enthusiasm and approval with every showing. Senior figures become emotionally invested in the experience before it exists. Sometimes the images are released publicly, extending that expectation to an audience that has yet to encounter the real thing.
What began as an imaginative proposal gradually becomes a collective commitment. The more people who have seen it and shared their excitement, the harder it becomes to question whether the original idea is still the best one.
The realities of production have not changed. A structure that appears to float above an immaculate landscape has to be supported by something. The ground beneath it may need substantial preparation before the creative work can begin. Resources that appeared available for the experience itself are suddenly required to make the site capable of accommodating it. None of this should surprise anyone involved in commissioning or producing ambitious work. Yet the conviction created by the presentation can be remarkably resistant to those realities.
By the time those conversations take place, the virtual world may have secured the commission. It has been shared and approved, and the people responsible for making it happen are working towards an image that everyone remembers. Changing something can feel like taking away part of the original ambition, even when the change might improve the eventual experience.
There is a considerable history of research into the way creative ideas become fixed. Nathan Crilly's work on design fixation explores how people become attached to particular solutions and how that attachment can be reinforced by the circumstances in which they work. Later research with Roxana Moroşanu Firth found that even a successful creative breakthrough can make subsequent discoveries more difficult. An idea that genuinely excites everyone can acquire enough authority to discourage the exploration of something better.
Yet much of the creativity in live work develops through making it. Theatre has understood this for generations. Rehearsal allows a production to become something that could not have been fully described when it was conceived. A venue can have a similar influence. An older building may resist the original intention, and that resistance can sometimes produce an unexpected solution. The character of a space becomes part of the work rather than simply the place in which it happens.
The difficulty comes when the creative process is expected to reproduce something that already appears complete. A discovery made during production can be treated as an inconvenience because it changes the approved image. The team may recognise a better possibility but find itself committed to an earlier decision that was made before the realities of the work were understood.
Creative teams develop their own ways of thinking. People become familiar with one another and share an understanding of what they are trying to achieve. That familiarity is often essential, but it can also create an invisible rope around the conversation. Everyone inside it may be looking at the same idea from much the same position, gradually losing sight of the assumptions on which it was built.
An unfamiliar perspective can change that. Someone who has not been part of the original conversations may notice something that everyone else has accepted without question. The contribution can come from an unexpected place, and it may initially be uncomfortable because it interrupts an idea that seemed settled. The producer is often well placed to recognise when the rope needs opening, allowing another voice to influence the work before its direction becomes impossible to change. The creative contribution lies in making that exchange possible, rather than assuming the best idea must come from those who began the conversation.
This has a long history in collaborative creative practice. Research by Guido Stompff and his colleagues has explored how surprises can cause teams to reconsider their assumptions and discover new approaches. The unexpected can become part of the creative process when people have the freedom to respond to it. Once the original presentation has become an obligation, that freedom can be much harder to preserve.
The extraordinary enthusiasm for immersive experiences offers an interesting example of how technological possibility and creative familiarity can develop at different speeds.
In 1925, audiences were already entering projection planetariums and finding themselves surrounded by an artificial night sky. The architecture appeared to disappear as the projected environment took over. The experience of being transported into another world through imagery has been with us for a century.
In 1996, I created a 360-degree goldfish bowl environment for a nightclub, with a giant hand reaching over the heads of the dancing audience to feed the fish. The idea came from a lyric in a song that made me imagine the world from the perspective of a fish looking out through the glass of its bowl.
The technology had developed sufficiently to make that imagined environment possible. It was the lyric that inspired the idea, rather than the technology suggesting what we should create with it.
Years later, I worked with the remarkable projection environment of Al Wasl Plaza at Expo 2020 Dubai, where an enormous architectural dome could be transformed through imagery. The technological development between those experiences is extraordinary, although the creative ambition to surround an audience with another world has a recognisable history.
There is no reason that familiarity should diminish the wonder of encountering something for the first time. A young audience entering an immersive environment today may be every bit as astonished as someone experiencing an early planetarium. The technology may be familiar to those who have worked with it for decades, but the experience belongs to the person discovering it.
The audience's relationship with that experience changes as it becomes more familiar. What once felt extraordinary can gradually become recognisable, even when the technology continues to improve. An exhibition may present beautiful new imagery while offering an experience that feels much like something the visitor has already encountered. The virtual presentation can still be spectacular, particularly to a commissioner seeing the format for the first time, while the audience has begun to expect something more.
The experience of Lighthouse Immersive is revealing. The company behind the enormously successful Immersive Van Gogh exhibitions reported selling approximately seven million tickets across its North American exhibitions. It demonstrated the extraordinary appetite that existed for the format, yet in 2023 the company entered insolvency proceedings. Subsequent accounts of its difficulties described how demand for newer productions had fallen as the novelty diminished. The success of the original exhibition could not simply be repeated by presenting different artistic material within a similar environment.
There were wider commercial circumstances, and other immersive organisations continue to attract enormous audiences. teamLab, for example, has developed experiences in which the visitor's presence can influence the environment itself. The possibilities of immersion are far from exhausted, but the commercial history of Lighthouse illustrates how the excitement surrounding a creative format can change as audiences become familiar with it.
It is one reason the accumulated knowledge of people who have worked with audiences over many years can be valuable. They may remember when a particular visual effect genuinely surprised people, or when the excitement began to fade. They may remember a production in which an elaborate element attracted little attention while something much smaller became the part people talked about afterwards. That understanding can influence the direction of new work, provided it has an opportunity to enter the conversation.
Much of this knowledge is difficult to preserve. We retain images of finished productions and record how many people attended, but the decisions that changed the work during its development often disappear when the people involved move on. A photograph can show how spectacular an environment looked without revealing whether the audience found it memorable. The reasoning behind an abandoned idea may never be recorded, even when that decision was fundamental to the success of the eventual experience.
Artificial intelligence is making this relationship between imagination and experience more interesting. It is now possible to generate an extraordinary visual environment from a relatively simple description. Ideas can be explored with a speed that would once have been unimaginable, opening creative possibilities to people who previously had little access to the tools needed to communicate them.
The same technology can make an undeveloped idea appear remarkably complete. An image may suggest that the atmosphere has been resolved and the audience's relationship with the environment has been understood, even though the creative conversation has barely begun. The people who might make the experience extraordinary have not necessarily had an opportunity to contribute.
After more than thirty years working in creative production, there is a moment in a briefing that I have come to recognise. A creative director begins describing an immersive experience they recently attended. The enthusiasm is genuine, and I can understand why they were impressed. But as the description unfolds, I realise I have encountered essentially the same idea hundreds of times.
My heart sinks a little. I try to remain engaged because their excitement is real, and there may still be something new to discover. Yet I recognise how easily the conversation can move from the experience that inspired them to an ambition to create something remarkably similar.
We have become so accomplished at presenting creative ideas that we are beginning to lose some of the tension that produces original work. An immersive environment can be imagined and rendered with such conviction that the creative process begins to revolve around reproducing it. The presentation attracts approval, the approval becomes expectation and the expectation begins to determine what can be made.
It is an uncomfortable possibility that some of the most sophisticated creative technology ever developed may be contributing to a less exploratory creative culture.
And yet the next generation gives me considerable reason for excitement. Many have grown up inhabiting realistic virtual worlds. Their imaginative references are already different, and I expect some extraordinary physical experiences to emerge from what they have encountered in those environments.
A song lyric once led me to imagine a nightclub inside a goldfish bowl. The technology available at the time allowed us to create it. I want to see what happens when someone whose imagination has been shaped by virtual worlds is given the freedom to take an equally unexpected idea into physical reality.
That freedom has to extend beyond the initial presentation. Creative leadership should challenge the familiar references that enter the briefing room, invite perspectives that disturb an apparently settled idea and resist the pressure to reproduce every detail of an approved image.
We may be entering an era in which it has never been easier to make an unoriginal idea look extraordinary. The challenge for those commissioning and creating experiences is to recognise the difference before the presentation becomes the production.
References
Crilly, Nathan (2015). “Fixation and creativity in concept development: The attitudes and practices of expert designers.” Design Studies, 38, 54–91. Read the research.
ScienceDirect
Crilly, Nathan and Roxana Moroşanu Firth (2019). “Creativity and fixation in the real world: Three case studies of invention, design and innovation.” Design Studies, 64, 169–212. Read the research.
Apollo
Stompff, Guido, Frido Smulders and Lilian Henze (2016). “Surprises are the benefits: Reframing in multidisciplinary design teams.” Design Studies. Read the research.
ScienceDirect
Deutsches Museum. “History of the Planetarium.” Documents the opening of the world's first projection planetarium in Munich on 7 May 1925, following demonstrations in 1923. Museum history.
Deutsches Museum
Expo 2020 Dubai / Visit Dubai. “Al Wasl Plaza.” Documents the 360-degree projection environment and its 252 laser projectors. Project information.
Visit Dubai
Lighthouse Immersive. Corporate website reporting more than seven million tickets sold across its immersive exhibitions. Company information.
teamLab (2026). “Tokyo's teamLab Museums Record Over 4.2 Million Visitors in 2025.” Visitor figures.
teamLab