AETHER

Shaping the Experience

Producing AETHER meant treating a 28-person company like a product team with a ship date. As executive producer, I led the whole production, including the guest journey, technology, marketing direction, finances, hiring, budgeting, forecasting and delivery. I worked with the director and specialist leads to bring each discipline into a shared production plan, and personally invented and built the interaction layer. 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.