Barcelona's technological nightmare that has excited the creator of 'Black Mirror'

Special correspondent to the Cannes Film Festival“Incredible!”, exclaims a man as he removes the virtual reality visor. “What the hell?”, blurts out a girl next to him. These are the first reactions from one of the groups that this Tuesday took the tour of The black mirror experience, the virtual reality installation participating in the Cannes Immersive section of the Cannes Film Festival. For 45 minutes, the six people in the group virtually travel through a futuristic flagship store to collect and personalize a life agent, a kind of personal assistant designed to “make the buyer’s life goals a reality”. Whatever they may be: fame, recognition, riches...

This virtual installation, located in a basement level of the luxurious Hotel Carlton in Cannes, was born in a studio in Barcelona's Poblenou, Univrse, which developed the project from the universe of the Netflix series Black mirror. “They contacted us. They were interested in shared reality and they chose us", explains David Bardos (Budapest, 1983), the studio's director. “Most immersive experiences are very static, but we have developed a new format that we call generative experiences, in which the user's behavior and appearance influence the story. In short, we put the user at the center and turn them into the hero of the story”.

Psychoanalyzed by Sigmund Freud

The story goes like this: first, one of the technicians from The black mirror experience takes a photo of you and you have to read a contract out loud. With the virtual reality visor on, the tour of the store begins, which includes a series of group games, a musical jam session, and a psychoanalysis session with Sigmund Freud himself, who asks you to explain a dream and then analyzes it in considerable detail. Finally, it's time to meet the life agent, who, oh surprise, has the same face and voice as you, although the gestures and expressions have that stiff and artificial air of AI, so unsettling and, deep down, so appropriate for a dystopian story. So you end up interacting with yourself, but a yourself with hidden and dark motivations that trigger a technological nightmare in which you and your groupmates end up facing a legion of virtual robots with your face and dodging laser sensors through underground galleries.

This mix of escape room and virtual reality experience had the enthusiastic approval of Charlie Brooker, the creator of Black Mirror, with whom the Univrse team met a couple of times. “At first we wanted to base it on one of the episodes of the series, but we opted to develop the story from a new episode and Brooker loved the idea –explains Bardos–. In fact, he gave us several inputs to fully capture the essence of Black Mirror”. The Black Mirror Experience is the first project of this kind carried out by Univrse, which, according to Bardos, hopes to produce other generative experiences in the future based on “universes like those of Harry Potter or Peaky Blinders” and in which “you don't just live the story, but also star in it”.

The Cannes Film Festival, which has been opening a small window to virtual reality audiovisual experiences for a few years now, is the setting for the first encounter between The Black Mirror Experience and the public, but there will be more: a week after the premiere in Cannes, an installation will open in Montreal, and then another will arrive in New York and a third in Madrid, which will open its doors on June 4. “There are no dates for Barcelona yet, but there will be –assures Bardos–. We are already talking to local promoters who are very interested. In the end, Univrse is a Barcelona-based studio, and the company has a great deal of Catalan talent, starting with the creative director and co-creator of The Black Mirror Experience, Damià Ferràndiz”.