The Mill's Rama Allen on STRATA

Last Friday [25 November] saw STRATA, The Mill's latest foray into VR, showcased at London's V&A museum as part of its Friday Late program. Previously seen on the Innovation Stage at Cannes Lions, the biometric VR experience responds to heart-rate, breathing, brain waves and stress levels, teaching users to focus their minds by navigating through fantastical worlds.

Below, shots speaks to Rama Allen, ECD at The Mill New York about the inspiration behind the project, the creative and technical challenges and why the VR industry needs more experiments like STRATA in order to develop.

STRATA is based on biofeedback experiments from the 1970s – what gave you the idea of turning it into a VR experience and how long has the project been in development?

STRATA was born out of twin fascinations: how we interact with digital media and how we can see the body's invisible machinations. You can connect these two things via standard consumer wearables, but those have always felt dissatisfying to me — you can read your heartbeat on your wrist, so what? 

I wanted to use technology to create a nontechnical relationship with ourselves, by creating a biofeedback system that’s felt rather than read, in an effort to complete the theatre of immersion and amplify it with the authenticity and power of real-time data feedback. VR, after all, is about transport, and the dream of the experience is quite fragile. To distract from the whole, is to interrupt the dream and, in turn, do a disservice to the medium and the feeling. 

I'm also interested in new control and interaction concepts. Can our films and games bend to our emotions? Can our autonomic nervous systems play a role in navigating and creating richer experiences? 

The prototype was built in a single sprint over a few weeks. We’ve continued to refine the signal processing and sensor construction since it was first built and hope to release a much more elegant and robust STRATA 2.0 in the near future.

The experience moves between five different ‘worlds’ including a ‘subterranean lake’ [above] and a ‘floating island’ – can you tell us more about the design of those worlds and where you drew creative inspiration from?

I love myth, hallucination and otherworldly constructs. A lot of my work is informed by authors like Borges and my own dream states - magical architecture, basically. For STRATA, I imagined what our ‘innerverse’ might look like translated into landscapes. I wanted the structure to be a continuous, chaptered progression that one could seamlessly levitate through. The design became a meditation on layers that feels like an emergence from darkness and solid environments, that moves upwards to ephemera and light.

What was the most challenging technical aspect of the process?

Testing for the sensor builds and the signal processing to create just the right kind of visual feedback were by far the most complicated aspects, and they continue to be as we evolve the experience. But we’ve made great leaps forward with some extremely promising technical applications and processing methods, which we hope to share soon. 

Other challenges include optimisation. The world is huge, and it needs to be loaded and available in its entirety from the get-go, to create a connective tissue as users look up and down. As we move forward, we're looking into new solves and, possibly, a new visual language as we consider more lightweight and democratic platforms like mobile VR.

What’s been the reaction from participants so far?

This might be the most rewarding work I’ve ever created. The responses have run from joyful tears, to calm awe. It seems to quiet our internal metronomes of anxiety, so a lot of people immediately want others to try it, to share that experience. Of course, there are some who don’t quite connect with it, but we'll continue to improve it. In the end, I just want people to feel something, whether it's simply beauty and relaxation, or deeper mindfulness and meaningful therapeutic shifts.

How did you get involved with the V&A?  

The Mill and the V&A were brought together through friends, Catherine Ince (Senior Curator, V&A East) and Jarrad Vladich (Emerging Tech Producer, The Mill), who sparked early conversations with the Videogame Team at the V&A. They gave us an insight into their exciting upcoming events which, in turn, sparked us into action to create a robust event version of the STRATA experience, which I had previously showcased on the Innovation Stage at this year’s Cannes Lions Festival.

STRATA’s potential uses include sports training, medical or psychological training – are you in talks with any brands yet and which ones might would be a good fit for this tech?

There’s been a great deal of interest! We’re still very much in the prototype phase, but are nearing solutions to create a working format for a diverse range of permanent installations; from the fine arts to medical facilities, as well as a publishable model for wider distribution. I'm incredibly excited to see where and how STRATA evolves.

Much of the best VR at the moment is based around pure entertainment rather than education or doing good - do you see this changing?

I do. Any new medium in its infancy will look backwards to find success. In our case, films and video games are obvious connections; but I believe VR has far greater possibilities that can only be found through more divergent thinking. I'm hoping to see more experiments like STRATA out there in the world. We must focus on VR's strengths and challenges. We must take chances. We must dream in new ways for this new medium.

For VR insights, the VR Creative Summit, organised by shots' parent company MBI, takes place on Tuesday 6 December. Tickets are available here.