Company Profile: Marshmallow Laser Feast

Tim Cumming trips the light fantastic with Barney Steel, co-founder of amazing immersive experience creators, Marshmallow Laser Feast. These London-based VR and projection-mapping specialists have the keys to a magic kingdom of robots and lasers, using real-time systems that create so many possibilities, even the most controlling client has to go with the literal flow

Gut instinct and high tech are the twin peaks on which Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF) builds its dreams. The Hackney Wick-based studio-laboratory has created stunning projection-mapping work for car marques such as McLaren and VW and mega-band U2, plus cutting-edge VR experiences that range from a synaesthesia project with Heston Blumenthal to the In The Eyes Of The Animal installation at Grizedale Forest Sculpture Park, commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices and Forestry Commission England’s Forest Art Works.

There must be something about VR and trees – MLF co-founder Barney Steel is about to start work on another ambitious forestry project, amid the giant sequoias of the Sierra Nevada. For him, nature and VR are an inspirational blend – tech is the third eye opening the mind to visions brought to life using scanning technologies so advanced that the user tech around it is still catching up.

Accidents with a McLaren P1

Steel came into the industry as an animator, first as a freelancer, then with his own Found Studio. Here he hooked up with fellow MLF founders Robin McNicholas and tech wizard Mehmet Akten (now departed to do a PhD) on a real-time projection mapping campaign for Sony PlayStation in 2011, employing live puppetry, 3D-tracking and pyrotechnics. “Robin and I were lead creatives. We’ve always had a relationship with really technical programmers,” Steel says. “They have the keys to the kingdom – unlimited control of robot arms, lasers, lighting systems. All driven by code.”

The MLF team specialises in real-time systems that they can enter and adapt at will, employing chance and gut instinct as much as technical know-how. As a result, accidents do happen – happy ones at that. “You have all these millions of possible combinations, and you suddenly hit on aesthetics or unexpected places you could never have imagined before you built the system,” says Steel. “That process of being in the moment, and ideas coming out of that, is the backbone of the company – fostering an environment where happy accidents can flourish.”

Surely accidents, happy or otherwise, are tricky to run past a major car brand with a major budget to manage? Steel laughs. “Getting your vision through to the final product is a real challenge,” he agrees. “The best commercials we’ve done are when the ad agency has a great relationship with the client, and they say, trust these guys and give them freedom and you’ll be happy in the end.”

As an example, Steel points to MLF’s Motion Light Painting piece for the McLaren P1 supercar. McLaren wanted a projection mapping piece based around the concept of air flow, technology and beauty. What they got was a technical tour-de-force in light-painting that revealed the car in representations of the wind-tunnel air flows that inspired its design. The boss at McLaren saw it, said they had a lot of nerve coming up to see him with something off-brief… then said he loved it. “And after that they didn’t have any influence on the project until we delivered,” beams Steel.

The subtle arts of projection mapping – projecting light onto an environment (it might be a room, an arena, a dome) and then transforming it, is a big part of MLF’s portfolio, often including VR elements, such as using markers to track individual viewers as they move about the space to create first-person illusions of perspective that are seemingly world-transforming. “Walls can become portals to other dimensions,” says Steel, “and you transform the space into whatever you want.” For U2’s video for single Invisible, that meant multiple LED screens filling the field of view to create real-time illusions of depth. For their laser-based Forest installation at the Barbican’s Digital Revolution exhibition, the team ignored the space completely and made it so dark that the only sense of space came from towering beams of light.

But technology, and MLF, are moving on. “We’re still exploring live music projects and immersive experiences with lasers and light sculptures,” says Steel, “but 90 per cent of our own work now is in VR.” Their breakthrough was with Lotus, using VR technology to reveal the invisible forces acting on the marque’s F1 car.

Virtual reality better than LSD

As a tech-driven derangement of the senses, VR is hard to beat, says Steel. “VR has more in common with everyday, lived experience than it does with film or theatre or computer games. Combine its simulations with tracking systems that give you the freedom to move around, and it convinces your whole body that you’re in another place, and it puts you in that other place.”

So when MLF posed the next logical question: ‘What can you do in VR that you could never do as a human?’ they answered with In The Eyes Of The Animal, a project in which you see the world anew not just through someone else’s eyes but something else’s eyes – as a mosquito, a dragonfly, a frog and an owl.

“The VR experience that people had actually took place in the same woods that we had scanned to create the project,” says Steel. “Afterwards, people would gather together and talk about it, all in the same location. It sparks off wonder, and that’s the key. It breaks the human sensory perspective, and connects you to nature.” One little old lady walking her dog through Grizedale Forest tried the headset and proclaimed loudly it was “the best thing I’ve done since LSD!” While she was away with the dragonflies, her loyal little dog sat at her feet, barking.

The next step, as resolutions sharpen and the latest advances in game engines push closer to full photo realism and total immersion, is the world of the molecular. Steel envisions a trip that takes you through the surface of things to their inner workings. “We’re using 3D scanning technology at the Natural History Museum to build those environments, so when you expect the resolution to drop out, we’ve gone in to micro detail, and the journey just keeps going. So it is literally the world beyond your senses – what does it look like if I put my head through this table and see into the grain of it?”

Equally audacious is the project with Heston Blumenthal, envisioning a synaesthetic relationship between sight, sound and taste in which a long straw is preloaded with different flavours and attendant visualisations, in which the users themselves appear. “We had the idea of sticking the straw in a cocktail glass, but this glass is the room you’re in, and you’re under water and see this giant straw enter the water, and as you’re sucking on the straw the water level goes down, and you look in the glass and there is a mini-you at the bottom of it. And at the end you can suck yourself up your own straw.”

Viewers can expect to drink themselves at a Heston pop-up soon, but in the meantime, the brave new world of mixed reality is only going to get more persuasively integrated with actual reality – the one we stub our toes on. “Ultimately, we’re headed to a place where VR will be 100 per cent convincing and you won’t be able to tell the difference between virtual and real,” says Steel. “Which offers amazing opportunities for human experience, but at the same time it could be pretty dark and addictive.” He chuckles. “Isn’t that always the way with technology?”