Meet Alessandro Anglani, Game Director, Narrative Designer and Developer of SEPHIROT® Interactive Experience, the VR experience developed by CHRONES. that takes edutainment and team building to a new level!

SEPHIROT® Interactive Experience was created to revolutionise how we interact with culture and corporate welfare. The project, currently under development, embraces virtual reality to transform museum visits and educational tours into immersive, engaging, and customisable experiences. It also aims to incentivise participation, well-being, and alignment with company policies for its employees!

Alessandro is in charge of designing the narratives and game mechanics that make the experience interactive and dynamic, ensuring that the user is always at the centre of the narrative. Enjoy the interview!

Let’s start with the usual game of our CHRONversations! Imagine being the main character of an RPG, fully customisable by name, appearance, goals, attitude and special abilities. Can you let us know Alessandro better through this double of his?

When it comes to role-playing, you never know whether to start with something close to you or go in the opposite direction, so Lore will influence me, the setting of our SEPHIROT® Multiverse.

My RPG alter ego is D, the Keeper of Time. D is a traveller from different planes of reality, with human Mediterranean features but eyes that reflect the light of LED circuits. He wears a robe that resembles a futuristic tapestry containing the history of mankind (which therefore also stretches out his mobility): it is a sort of digital mantle that pulses with binary code and changes colours as it is updated.

The Time Keeper’s mission is to recreate and preserve memories of the now inaccessible physical reality in the virtual one. D has an extremely curious and daring spirit, which often puts him at risk for his existence. But never mind—the greatest danger would be getting tangled up in his clothing!

Some special skills: ‘Virtual Syncretism’ allows D to interface with reality and ‘communicate’ with digital worlds by transferring tangible experiences into abstract concepts. Through ‘Empathic Alchemy’ he knows when to take a break from bombarding the neighbours with his psychedelic excesses and with the ‘Nutritional Navigator’ he knows how to find the best restaurants in the area.

SEPHIROT® is an interactive storytelling system created for live performances: theatrical shows that leave the threads of a story with multiple endings in the hands of the audience and performers. But what was the spark for SEPHIROT® Interactive Experience? Was there a moment, a precise intuition, when you realised it was necessary to develop the same system for use in the extended reality, in the corporate and cultural sphere?

The spark for SEPHIROT® Interactive Experience came almost like a ‘click’ between live performance and the potential of immersive technology. During our interactive theatre experiences, I perceived how the narrative was transformed and enriched when the audience and actors shared decision-making power ‘in real time’, creating a vibrant, ever-changing experience.

The SEPHIROT® board has always been a non-place from the beginning, an abstract architecture in the context of a physical place, and Virtual Reality by osmosis became that digital place where the board itself could be hosted, further expanding the possibilities of integrated interactivity and the concept of ‘simulation’.

With the very rapid advancement of extended reality technologies (in 2016, at the time of SEPHIROT®’s birth, the Oculus Rift, which had just been purchased in 2014 by Facebook, had not yet passed through my hands), I realised that this was not just an artistic experiment, but a new narrative language that extended the possibilities of video games, with wonderful applications in the corporate and cultural spheres as well.

When I perceived that the context of a theatre show was ‘not enough’, and that the interactions of SEPHIROT® had a real and concrete impact on the ethical and moral system of the participants, our Players, I realised that the potential could be even greater and that the system could allow us to become better people, simply by ‘simulating’ aspects of our lives that in everyday life we deal with lightly or are hampered by bias.

After the prototype experimentation in the Virtual Reality of SEPHIROT®, the idea was born to transform it into a platform that could dialogue with the audience in a dynamic and immersive way, offering experiences that adapt and evolve in real-time thanks to the creative and artistic contribution of the human being, just like on stage, but with the potential offered by virtual and augmented reality.

Is there a technical or narrative detail that you believe is the real secret heart of the experience, something that the person experiencing it may not notice right away, but that makes all the difference?

The secret, for me, lies in that almost imperceptible synergy between human and narrative technique. In SEPHIROT®, the narrative is a navigable hyper-structure, with ‘fixed’ and ‘moving’ moments that reward each gesture and emotion of the performer by translating it into interactive signals that influence the decisions of all participants in the story. Requiring this extreme concentration on the part of the stories’ protagonists, who “struggle” to explore ramifications in the plot that can benefit them, moves and excites me.

This mechanism, which many might not notice at first glance, is the beating heart of the experience, which is why SEPHIROT® was born before SEPHIROT® Interactive Experience was born. It is a kind of ‘silent language’ between actors, technology and participants, in which each interaction, however subtle, contributes to shaping the evolution of the story in real-time.

Gradually, the boundary between play, performance, virtual environment, actor and participant dissolves, becoming a co-creation of who is present at that moment.

Every experience has its wow moment that, as soon as the user discovers it, completely changes the perception of the experience. For SEPHIROT® Interactive Experience, what is the wow moment you can’t wait for the user to discover?

The ‘wow’ moment in SEPHIROT® Interactive Experience occurs when the user realises that their actions (collaborative, even more so than solo) can radically change the course of the narrative. Imagine being immersed in the experience and that the first choice, to engage in one activity rather than another, which seemed almost random, becomes the seed from which a new branch of the story sprouts.

In addition, thanks to the digitisation that the platform allows, interactions are recorded and returned at the end of the experience, allowing the user not only to know which ramification of the story they followed, and inviting them to try again to reach a new ending, but also to identify which interactions were preferred, which choices were wrong, and which were difficult to collaborate with others.

This anonymous data can provide cultural institutions and companies with interesting statistics for the continuous improvement of processes with a strong human component.

We have reached the end and the question is always the same. If you could collaborate with another artist (living or not) in the field of new technologies, who would it be and why? What would you create together?

If I had to collaborate with an artist in the field of new technologies, I would choose Laurie Anderson. Beyond my fondness for minimalism as an artistic current (Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Robert Wilson, Godfrey Reggio), her ability to fuse storytelling, music and performance with technological tools is a great source of inspiration for me. Despite the limitation of the more electronic than digital technique, Laurie always transcends the boundaries between art and science, perception and reality. Other special mentions are Masha Kechaeva, Bear Kirkpatrick (whom we interviewed here), Pierre Paslier.

Photo: 2019 ©Pietro Ballardini