Black Mirror Experience

UNIVRSE, a Barcelona-based virtual reality company, approached us to design the physical rooms for their Black Mirror Experience, a VR experience built with the Black Mirror brand, an affiliate of the Netflix show. The VR piece takes visitors through an immersive story about a dystopian technology company called Phaethon. It draws on no single episode, but keeps the show's philosophical and dystopian spirit. UNIVRSE asked us to design three physical rooms, before and after the show, that would make the fictional company Phaethon feel real (and make it matter), carry some of the elements of the VR experience into physical space, and get visitors thinking about the ethical questions the story raises. Our role was the concept, content, space, products and graphics of these rooms, built so they would hold up alongside the VR story and add to it.

Understanding the idea

The project worked in two dimensions at once.

The first was material: the look, sound and feel of it all. We designed the brand identity of a fictional company, and of the experience around it, reaching for a sleek, Silicon-Valley tone in both the visuals and the language, while letting its darker possibilities sit just underneath. It is the hyper-technological-but-doomsday register that runs through so many Black Mirror episodes. Even the company's name carries it: Phaethon, the figure from Greek myth who took the reins of the sun chariot and, driving it too close to the Sun, burned it. A company that promises to give you your life back, named after a cautionary tale about reaching too far.

The second dimension sat over the whole experience. We wanted to frame a set of questions about our relationship with technology: privacy and data, invasiveness, agency, what we hand over without quite noticing. Folding that more philosophical layer in quietly, and letting the design itself carry it so that visitors arrive at the questions through the choices we made rather than being told them, was the heart of the project.

Trajectory of the rooms

The experience moved through three spaces we designed, two before the VR story and one after.

The Black Mirror Area is the first room, an institutional antechamber to the whole thing: a sleek, calm reception where visitors redeem their tickets, pass the gift shop, and wait in colour-coded rows before going in. Here they meet Phaethon for the first time, through a video of its founder, Cody Winters, and through the first LifeAgent posters on the walls. It sets the tone: corporate, polished, quietly aspirational.

The Phaethon Store comes next, still before the VR experience. It is built as the brand's flagship shop, the place where Phaethon sells its idea of a better life. Visitors browse LifeAgent, the company's flagship product, and the catalogue of devices around it: PhaethonVault, PhaethonLumina, PhaethonSync, PhaethonLink. 

In a second part of the store, they are asked to complete a personal "LifeGoals" form and to step onto a platform for a "bioscan," presented as a step in their "integration." It feels like signing up for a wellness product. It is also the moment they hand over their data.

The Post-Show Area is the last room, and the only one that comes after the VR story. We built it as a data centre, a cool, minimal space sitting somewhere between Phaethon's world and the Black Mirror one. Visitors scan the wristband they were given at the start and are shown the biometric data collected on them along the way, then asked whether they want to delete it or keep it. On the walls, a series of "would you rather" questions, several of them lifted straight from Black Mirror episodes, ask them to sit with what they have just done.

Process

We began with direction and framing. We set our visual and theoretical references, worked out the main points of the Phaethon brand and the Black Mirror side of things, and stayed on conceptual ground long enough to anchor the work in a few guiding ideas before making anything. We also went to the UNIVRSE studio to try the VR experience ourselves, to get a feel for its language, visual and verbal, to see how it unfolds, and to understand how best to frame it, before and after.

From there we worked room by room, designing each piece: the graphics and posters, the space, the products, the interface copy. At every step we checked it against what UNIVRSE was putting in the VR, so the two would line up. We also slipped in a fair few Black Mirror easter eggs, small nods to characters and episodes from the show. The "would you rather" questions in the final room, for instance, each rework a real episode, from Nosedive to Arkangel to Striking Vipers.

The interesting aspect: making the physical analogue of a VR story

This was one of the most interesting parts of the project: how do you build the visual, spatial and material counterpart to a fictional VR story? There is something undeniably cinematic about working with an invented company and its world. But the aim was not simply to make it look realistic. It was to hold a more liminal space, between lucid fiction and immersion, and to draw visitors into that world without ever tipping over into parody. We wanted a plausible, logical counterpart to the VR experience. Matching it without mirroring it.

Working from pure fiction was itself unusual for us. We try to weave new narratives in almost every project, but we very rarely start from something entirely invented; usually the work is about anchoring a story in reality. Here it was the other way around.

That tension was sharpest in the post-show room, where we placed visitors inside invented but entirely possible scenarios, each carrying the same kind of ethical and social dilemma as the VR story. It was a way to bring the fiction back home. Yes, this is an imaginary story. But the questions it raises about privacy, about agency, and about what we give away when we hand our lives to a machine are not. “LifeAgents don’t exist, but your data does.”

On tour

The VR experience and the rooms around it are built to travel. That meant designing for a genuinely general audience, people of all ages and backgrounds, in different countries. The questions had to work the same way: clear enough for anyone to follow, open enough to still be worth thinking about, whoever you are.
In 2026, the experience travelled across four cities: Montréal from May to September, Madrid from June to August, New York from June to September, and São Paulo, where it is still open until October 31. Each stop placed the same experience in a different cultural context, testing whether its questions could remain accessible, relevant and thought-provoking wherever it went.