The Black Mirror Experience is a 60-minute free-roam LBVR narrative where six players move through a branching story together — a story about AI consuming your life, built in part using generative AI to make it work. Writer Joshua Rubin breaks down how AI solved one of immersive narrative’s hardest design problems — giving individuals meaningful personal choices inside a shared group experience — and what it means to wield that tool inside a fiction that’s warning you about it. The talk covers writing to Black Mirror’s tone for a broad audience, using gen AI as moments of improvisation within an authored narrative structure, and sustaining story across double the industry-standard duration for location-based VR.

About the Speaker
Joshua Rubin is an Interactive Emmy-winning, Cannes Immersive–honored narrative director best known for video games including Assassin’s Creed 2 (Ubisoft), Destiny (Bungie), The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones (Telltale Games). He wrote the Black Mirror LBVR experience for Univrse, which received a Special Jury Mention in competition at Cannes Immersive. He recently prototyped a VR game featuring agentic AI characters with Meta and Jon Snoddy (former head of Disney Imagineering R&D), and was Narrative Director on Orion Drift, the new title from the creators of Gorilla Tag, the first $100M VR game. He developed the Story Living framework for immersive narrative design, first presented at SXSW 2025. He spends most of his time co-raising two feral humans and a quite civilized cat deep in the woods by the Hudson River.