Adipat Virdi is our Executive Director, XR (Global) he’s joined the Cinesite’s leadership team to oversee our XR initiatives worldwide. With a proven track record in XR and immersive technologies, Adi brings over two decades of experience and skills which he has brought to projects for a wide range of major brands and organisations such as BBC, Sony, Netflix, Virgin Atlantic, HSBC, Cosworth, Harbour Immersive, NASA, Charlotte Tilbury, Balenciaga, Lamborghini, Nike, IoC, Real Madrid and PagoNXT amongst others.

Adi specialises in developing immersive storytelling frameworks for both social and commercial impact. He joins us from Facebook (Meta), where he was the Global Creative Product Lead for Immersive, spearheading the Emerging Platforms team’s exploration of VR/XR and immersive experiences. We caught up with Adi to find out more about his career path and what is involved in helping clients tell their stories and deliver amazing immersive experiences. 

HOW DID YOU GET INTO IMMERSIVE?

My parents gave me the choice of architecture, medicine or law as subjects to take at University. I chose architecture as it felt like the most creative. I worked my way up, specializing in socio-spatial analysis, and then decided to give it all up and go back to uni and do a masters in screenwriting. If my parents had asked, I wanted to write and make films. However, after the degree, my careers dovetailed and I found a path that led me to immersive via transmedia and interactive. I’ve always worked on the liminal edge of storytelling and experience design and find myself exploring this at the nexus between tech, strategy and innovation.

HOW WOULD YOU DEFINE IMMERSIVE?

I think it’s important to differentiate immersive from interactive. These two terms get used interoperably and I think there’s value in being clear about what we mean by them:

Immersive focuses on enveloping the audience in a fully realized world, making them feel like they are part of the story or environment, often with minimal direct control over the outcome. It is primarily about sensory and emotional depth.
Interactive focuses on giving the audience agency within the experience, allowing them to participate, make choices, and affect the outcome. It is primarily about engagement and user-driven input.

What we are building at Cinesite is the capacity to do both and talk about immersion rather than immersive. This, for me, is about using both immersive and interactive strategy and design that gives audiences the opportunity to be participants rather than just observers. Essentially, the ability to be able to inhabit an experience rather than just watch it.

WHAT DO YOU FIND EXCITING ABOUT IT?

When we think about immersion, this isn’t just another component that can be added onto existing experiences (mostly as a marketing ploy). This shift is being determined by changing consumption behaviour and therefore requires clients to shift their brand DNA to be XR-ready. What I find most exciting is that we are now working to not only build exciting experiences but help to determine the future of storytelling. Secondly, the opportunity to work on projects across many other verticals (fashion, automotive, retail, and more) that will be just as much about innovation as they are about creativity.

CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT A COUPLE OF USES OF EMERGING TECHNOLOGY YOU’VE BEEN INVOLVED WITH, AND THEIR IMPACT?

COLLABORATION STUDIO: Working with a sports brand, I used VR to build a collaboration studio that responded to the emerging trend of belonging rather than buying. Instead of buying a product, the idea here was to create a more meaningful connection to how the product connected to the customer. We built an opportunity for customers to co-create the product at all stages of design and work with leading designers to enhance the personalisation aspects of the end product. The impact here was that the products became more of a component part of the consumer’s identity that ended in localised, online gallery spaces where the products were showcased to friends as an extension of identity rather than just a commodity. We used narrative as software to enhance the affinity between the customer and the product.

SENSORY EXPERIENCE DESIGN: Using AR and VR, I worked with a leading e-bike brand to see if we could create an XR experience that could replicate real-world tactile experiences. Using just a headset and controllers, we built ‘moments’ such as (among others): being able to differentiate between a graphite frame and an aluminium one; what it would be like to ride the bike in the streets; what the engine looked like if you opened it up. The impact here was to give cost effective and more individual experiences for customers to get to know what they were buying. This led to working with a sport’s car brand with the brief being to see if we could get customers to spend £250k + on a car without removing their headset. We were using XR to build an empathy engine.

WHAT ARE CINESITE’S PLANS WITH IMMERSIVE?

Cinesite Immersive has three aims: to define itself as a third division, alongside VFX and Animation, that enhances our existing skill set as well as build new and exciting ones; to provide existing clients with more opportunities and to attract new clients across more verticals; to become recognised as a global hub for XR.

TELL US A BIT MORE ABOUT YOU. WHAT DO YOU ENJOY DOING IN YOUR SPARE TIME?

I am a father of three (7, 4 and 20months). They keep me busy! In any time left over, I tend to play squash and build Lego mosaics (mainly of family photos). Also like to read good (or bad) conspiracy fiction novels – anything with words like ‘secret’, ‘code’ or ‘lost’ in the title are a winner! Fun facts: I made our wedding cake and I dj’ed all around London way back when. Consequently, I developed a real skill for mixing pop into hip hop (who knew Chesney Hawkes and Snoop Dogg had such rhythmic synchronicity!).

Adi on the decks!

A Lego family mosaic