Project Type
Architainment/Immersive Experience. An XR immersive installation that was created and produced by Peter Flaherty.
Project Name
In September 2026 Empire At Sea had its world premiere at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival where it won the prestigious Immersive Achievement Prize. It was commissioned by Lincoln Center, where it will have its North American premiere in January 2027, and ASU Gammage, where it will be presented at Tempe Center for the Arts in March 2027. This solarpunk drama about a group of climate scientists who move to a remote oil rig for their summer sabbatical to try to create a sustainable city at sea explores contemporary themes of climate change, sustainability, inclusionary vs exclusionary principles, and multicultural communities. It has a broad public reach and speaks directly to the climate change generation with a thrilling father-daughter story about immigration and multicultural communities. It features a diverse and recognizable cast, including Orlando Jones (American Gods), Ayelet Zurer (Spielberg’s Munich), Geoffrey Arend (Goliath), and Beth Grant (No Country for Old Men). It was supported by Agog and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Design Criteria
Climate science has a communication problem. The data is clear, the models are precise, and the urgency is beyond dispute — yet the public understanding of what climate change means for human communities, relationships, and survival somehow remains dangerously abstract. Empire At Sea was created to address that gap. Using breakthrough holographic technology, it makes climate science emotionally immediate for the audience who needs it most: the younger generations who will live with the consequences of inaction. The immersive, holographic format is not incidental to the mission — it is central to it. In a digital media landscape increasingly defined by atomized, screen-based consumption, Empire At Sea models a different possibility: people together, in space, moved by a story. And what better place was there to premiere such a project than at the Venice Film Festival, the oldest film festival in the world in "The Floating City”? Surrounded by rising and encroaching waters, Venice is a beautiful, challenging, and profound place to ponder this universal existential crisis.
Project Description
Empire At Sea is a solarpunk AR drama about a group of climate scientists who move to a remote oil rig for their summer sabbatical to try to create a sustainable city at sea. Halfway through the summer, the big one hits and wipes out the coast. Unable to make contact with the mainland, our group must fend for themselves. We drop into the story five years later and meet Lani, our young female protagonist, on the morning she sees a boat on the horizon – the first boat or sign of civilization they have seen in five years. The drama centers on whether our group should allow the strangers aboard or repel them by force.
We experience the story alongside ten fellow audience participants using Apple Vision Pro headsets, which allow us to follow the characters as large cinematic holograms and explore the magical setting on our custom-made interactive LED table from which the characters appear to emanate. We can move around the table freely to immerse ourselves in the story from any perspective and interact with the participatory, branching aspects of the narrative. The project will be shown as a marquee immersive installation using Apple Vision Pro and then distributed on all VR headsets and mobile phones for at-home audiences.
Challenges and Solutions
The story has multiple branches that the audience participants can follow. They navigate the space as they choose, tracking characters and storylines as they move around the hologram table. By making individual choices about what to focus on, each participant gets a unique social story experience. To immerse the audience fully in the human aspect of the drama, the volumetric characters were captured at the most advanced holographic capture stage ever built using 100 8k cameras to capture lifelike characters that can be experienced with full freedom of movement, allowing audiences to explore the story like never before. The volumetric reconstruction and 4DGS training was completed by 4DV, who are a market leader in gaussian splat production.
Photo credit: Dougal Henken
Equipment
The story is experienced in M5 Apple Vision Pros by ten audience participants simultaneously. The shared social storytelling experience is a big part of what makes AR special. You can see and interact with the other participants that are immersed in the holographic story with you as it unfolds. The experience lasts twenty-two minutes, so a venue can program two groups of ten guests per hour. Your device’s position is tracked, so your sonic and visual experience of the story is unique to your physical movements and choices. Empire At Sea combines volumetric 4DGS characters with mesh-and-texture scenery, which was programmed in Unity, with interactive lighting to tell a dramatic, immersive story. Our custom LED TABLE is fourteen feet long and nine feet wide, supported by a single cylindrical base with tapered, laser-cut aluminum ribs to create the sensation of a massive, floating tabletop featuring 8,400 individually mapped LED diodes makes the holograms appear to be emanating from the table, like "the Princess Leia effect" from Star Wars. Overhead is a sixteen foot by eight foot LED light ring, and underneath the table are undercarriage and base lighting that allow three horizontal strata of lighting to convey the mood of the environmental and temporal storytelling, and accentuate our unique vertical gaussian splat transitions. The table is also visible in the story itself, which creates a diegetic sense of inclusion in the narrative world for our audience.
Team
Created, Directed, and Produced by Peter Flaherty
Written by Peter Flaherty, Merritt Tierce, Julia Dyer, and Hannah Pearl Utt
Production Companies:
4DV.ai
Flaherty Pictures
NightLight Labs
Digital Technical Director: Jesse Garrison
Composer: Sage Lewis
Sound Design: Scott Hirsch
Cast:
Orlando Jones
Ayelet Zurer
Imani Jade Powers
Geoffrey Arend
Beth Grant
Terrence Bernie Hines
Charlene deGuzman
Julanne Chidi Hill
Mary Chieffo
Robert Baker
3D Artist: Gehrig Campbell-Dempsey
Unity Programmers: Arvin Tehrani, Kat Fox, Ryan Nelson
Interactive Table Design and Sculpting: Michael Darling
Interactive Table Electronics and Programming: Trey Gilmore
Featured Musicians: Odeya Nini (Vocals) and Gavin Templeton (Saxophones and Bass Clarinet)
Initial Volumetric Development: Infinite Realities
Line Producer for Volumetric Capture: Rogers Marquess
NightLight Labs Producer: Sal Mannino
Concept Art, Development, and Props for Volumetric Capture: Amber LaRosa
Welder & Carpenter: Sam Odysseus Wolken
Digital Printing for the LED Table: Shaurjya Banerjee
LED panel Assembly: Jackie Aldern, Kensaku Shinohara, Tomoko Shinohara, and JOE
Commissioned by Lincoln Center and ASU Gammage
With Commissioning Support from Schwarzman Center at Yale University
Supported by Agog
Supported by The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation