AETHER

Designing the Interface

Producing AETHER meant treating a 28-person company like a product team with a ship date. The show's director owned the performance; I owned everything around it: the guest journey, the technology, the marketing tone, and the business, so that every department was building toward the same picture. The orb was the central interface decision. A screen in the guests' hands would have broken the world, so the interface became light. Each character carried an orb; when a guest tapped their card with that character, the orb registered the encounter and the network knew. Every orb also had one scripted moment where it came to life, its brightness fluctuating as if breathing, which turned a piece of hardware into a story beat. This continued the "invisible interface" thinking from MAIA: the technology is present but never asks to be looked at. The hive mind closed the loop. By the end of a performance, the network held a record of every encounter each guest had chosen. The AI read that record and wrote them a story that was theirs, not a template with their name inserted. The design challenge was less the generation itself than the constraints around it: the story had to stay inside the world's lore, reflect what the guest actually did, and hold up to the guest who had just lived it.