Empire at Sea

Empire at Sea is a solarpunk augmented-reality drama that reimagines cinematic storytelling as a shared, spatial experience. Created by writer and director Peter Flaherty, the 22-minute work follows a community of climate scientists living aboard a remote oil rig as they attempt to build a sustainable city at sea. At its heart is a father-daughter story about growing up, responsibility, community, and how we respond to an uncertain future.

The story explores contemporary themes of climate change, sustainability, inclusion, migration, and multicultural communities. Its setting is intentionally ambiguous: we could be just beyond the present day or far ahead. That ambiguity allows the work to function less as science fiction prediction and more as a mirror for choices being made now.

Empire at Sea uses innovative technology to change the way the story can be experienced. Guests gather around a custom sculptural LED table while wearing Apple Vision Pro headsets. Volumetrically captured performances appear as holographic characters within and around the physical installation, while synchronized lighting, spatial audio, digital scenery, and the surrounding environment combine into a single narrative world. The innovation lies not simply in using augmented reality, but in making space, movement, and point of view part of the storytelling language.

The experience begins by establishing a shared visual focus. Guests encounter the world together and gradually learn, without tutorials or menus, how to move through it. As the drama develops, scenes begin to divide across the physical space. One moment may unfold on one side of the table while another plays simultaneously elsewhere. Later, the narrative can branch into multiple concurrent perspectives.

Audiences are free to move, follow different characters, observe other guests, and decide where to direct their attention without ever leaving the story. Different participants may witness different moments and come away with different interpretations of the same narrative. The system was intentionally designed to teach this behavior gradually. Rather than presenting guests with instructions, buttons, or conventional interactive interfaces, the work uses a breadcrumb approach to onboarding. Audiences first learn to observe, then to move, and eventually to make intuitive choices about where to place themselves within the experience. Movement and curiosity become the interface.

The table itself is more than a display. It's a physical anchor for the entire experience. Its imagery, lighting, and color are synchronized with the virtual world seen through the headsets, while environmental lighting extends those visual cues into the room. The result continually blurs the boundary between what exists physically and what exists digitally. That shared physicality is central to Empire at Sea. Many headset-based experiences isolate participants from one another. Empire at Sea was designed to do the opposite. Guests remain aware of the people around them, move around the same physical object, notice where others are directing their attention, and react together as scenes unfold. As the narrative develops, audiences are not only choosing where to look; they are being asked to reconsider whose point of view they occupy.

Empire at Sea points toward a form of cinema that is no longer confined to a frame. The work retains the authored performance, editing, sound, and emotional structure of film, while adding the spatial awareness and communal presence associated with live performance. The audience can move through the story, discover different perspectives, experience moments collectively, and build its understanding through physical presence.

The headset, volumetric performance, spatial audio, synchronized media systems, and the custom LED installation are not innovations presented for their own sake. Each exists to expand the expressive possibilities of the narrative. Together, they create a new way of telling stories, where attention, movement, scale, perspective, and shared presence become part of the narrative itself.