Andrew McGuinness is the founder and CEO of the award-winning digital entertainment business Ellipsis Entertainment and its trading brand, Layered Reality.
Layered Reality created and operates two of London’s highest-rated immersive entertainment experiences: Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds: The Immersive Experience and The Gunpowder Plot. With its three-layered approach, it creates an immersive experience that is truly memorable by fusing cutting-edge digital technology such as virtual reality, projection mapping, and volumetric holograms with real physical sensations like touch, temperature, smell, sound and music, physical movement, and taste, as well as live theatre, with live actors, movie-scale sets, and special effects.
Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds: The Immersive Experience won Layered Reality a Thea Award. The War of the Worlds experience is on a huge scale, taking place on a set of 22,000 square feet and incorporating technologies such as VR alongside traditional theatrical elements.
Speaking to blooloop about The Gunpowder Plot in 2022, he said that the experience is as close as humanity has come to a time machine:
“You step back into 1605. Rather than viewing or reading about history, you become part of that history. You become a participant in the plot to blow up parliament and the King. Ultimately, you have to decide whether you are going to back the King or whether you are going to back the plotters. The technology and the layered reality tools allow us to tell that story in a way that otherwise couldn’t be done.”
On the rise of immersive experiences and new developments in storytelling, he added:
“For a long time, for most of humanity’s existence, we have been told stories. Then we were able to see them, first as theatre, then as film, then TV, from the beginning of the 20th century. Now, we can participate in those stories. I think that is a big trend; a big change to storytelling.”