This is Hamamoto from TIMEWELL Inc.
Ten Years of Stepping Inside Stories
At SXSW 2025, the team from Lucasfilm's ILM xLab took the stage to reflect on a decade of immersive storytelling and share where they see the medium heading next. ILM xLab is a Lucasfilm studio dedicated to one core mission: creating experiences that let audiences step inside the story.
Over ten years, ILM xLab produced landmark VR projects including Trials on Tatooine, Vader Immortal, and Carne y Arena. Each built on the last — accumulating hard-won knowledge about emotional connection with characters, presence within narrative, and what it actually takes to make a person feel they inhabit a fictional world.
How ILM xLab Came to Exist
ILM xLab was not built from scratch — it grew from a long-held Lucasfilm ambition. In the 1990s, the company had a team called Lucasfilm Learning, working on educational content that combined storytelling, interactivity, and high-quality visuals. The vision was ahead of its time, and the technology wasn't ready to realize it.
Around 2013, the Oculus Rift DK2 arrived and changed the calculus. The technology was finally close enough. Lucasfilm launched ILM xLab as a dedicated studio for interactive immersive experience development — and the ten-year experiment began.
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Vader Immortal: Putting the User at the Center
Vader Immortal is among ILM xLab's most recognized works. In it, users become Darth Vader's apprentice — wielding a lightsaber, learning the Force, standing in the presence of one of cinema's most iconic characters.
The creative process behind it required a significant pivot. The initial development direction borrowed from film — narrative unfolding in sequence, the user as audience. But that approach undersold what VR actually offers. The team made a fundamental shift: the user is not the audience. The user is the protagonist.
One specific design choice illustrates the principle: in scenes where Vader's presence should feel overwhelming, his gaze was tied to the user's eye tracking. When Vader speaks to you, he is speaking to you — directly, personally. The content of the dialogue mattered less than the weight of being addressed. That directness created the emotional bond users reported between themselves and the character.
Carne y Arena: The Academy Award-Winning Border Experience
ILM xLab's other milestone work is Carne y Arena, a collaboration with filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu. The piece places viewers inside the experience of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border — walking with a group, overhearing fragments of their conversations, moving through a desert landscape rendered with physical-scale accuracy.
The emotional intensity of Carne y Arena comes from VR's unique capacity for empathy. The scene in which border patrol agents detain the group was described by some viewers as so visceral they collapsed to their knees. This is not something a film can do. The medium does work that the narrative alone cannot.
Carne y Arena received an Academy Award — specifically, a Special Award recognizing "powerful storytelling in an emerging medium." The piece demonstrated that immersive experience is not a gimmick or a genre; it is a distinct form with distinct emotional capabilities.
Mixed Reality: New Forms of Character Interaction
ILM xLab's ambitions extend beyond VR into mixed reality (MR). Avengers: Damage Control is a location-based experience in which groups of four become members of the Avengers — equipped with VR headsets and haptic suits, fighting against enemies in a shared physical-virtual space.
In MR experiences, virtual characters exist within the real world rather than replacing it. Iron Man appears in front of you. He responds to your movements in real time. The sensation of presence with a fictional character reaches a different register than any screen-based medium has achieved.
ILM xLab sees character interaction as one of the defining possibilities of the format — and Avengers: Damage Control as a proof of concept for how it can work at scale, in a venue environment.
Getting to More People: The Distribution Challenge
VR and MR remain early-stage in terms of mainstream adoption. The headset friction — the physical awkwardness of putting a device on your head — remains a real barrier. ILM xLab is working on lighter, more accessible hardware as part of the solution.
The other part is venue distribution. Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy's Edge — a VR attraction developed in partnership with Disney theme parks — brings immersive Star Wars storytelling to audiences who will never own a headset at home. The experience recreates Batuu, the frontier outpost featured in Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge, and lets visitors explore it and interact with its characters from within.
Location-based entertainment of this kind may be the primary delivery mechanism for high-end immersive experiences in the medium term. As 5G-enabled cloud streaming matures, home delivery of equivalent experiences becomes more realistic — but the venue path is available now.
Summary
ILM xLab's decade is a decade of learning what the medium can actually do — and building experiences that use those capabilities honestly.
- VR's core strength: Placing the user at the center of the narrative, not the periphery
- Vader Immortal: Proved that emotional bonds with fictional characters are achievable through VR
- Carne y Arena: Demonstrated VR's unique capacity for empathy and presence — recognized with an Academy Special Award
- Mixed reality: Characters that exist in physical space, responding in real time — a new form of interaction
- Distribution: Theme park venues + lighter hardware + cloud streaming as the path to broader audiences
What ILM xLab has built over ten years is both a body of work and a set of design principles for a medium that is still becoming. The next ten years will be about taking those principles to scale.
References:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LQ6f_VIG2o
- https://www.lucasfilm.com/what-we-do/immersive-entertainment/