Beyond Special Effects

From Illusion to Experience

Long before cinema, illusionists, pyrotechnicians, stage directors, makeup artists, set designers, and automaton builders were already producing what we would now call special effects.

The technologies involved were mechanical, chemical, optical, or pyrotechnic, but they shared a common objective: to transform a creative intention into a perceptible experience, generally intended for entertainment.

A theatrical apparition, a computer-generated dragon, and a fireworks display may seem to belong to different worlds. Yet all give form to a phenomenon that could not manifest in the same way under ordinary conditions.

Beyond giving form to an idea, special effects seek to create, modify, or intensify a perception through a technical system, in order to make an absent, impossible, or difficult-to-produce phenomenon credible, perceptible, or spectacular.

Other disciplines also combine creativity and technology, but special effects are distinguished by the range of phenomena they seek to produce and by the diversity of means employed to achieve them. Over time, they have mobilized and repurposed an ever-wider variety of technologies to give coherent form to almost any imagined phenomenon.

Special effects may be one of the fields in which human creativity and technology have learned to push each other the furthest.

— Vivake Gupta

Why Digital Technology Changed Everything

Traditional special effects were closely tied to the systems that produced them: mechanisms, machinery, optical processes, chemical reactions, or pyrotechnic devices. Each illusion generally required a specific technical solution.

Digital technology marks a break: a phenomenon can now be constructed as a computational representation before the means by which it will be made perceptible are determined.

For example, the form and movement of a wave can be digitally simulated before being translated into images, light, or movement through space.

It is no longer necessarily a matter of directly producing an illusion, but of digitally constructing a phenomenon and then giving it a perceptible form in a medium.

Creative intention
 ↓
Digital construction of the intended phenomenon
 ↓
Translation into a medium or system
 ↓
Perceptible manifestation
 ↓
Perceptual experience

This separation makes the process reusable: the same representation can be translated into different media using shared computing and processing infrastructures.

Digital technology has thus replaced solutions designed on a case-by-case basis with a construction pipeline that can be transferred from one phenomenon to another.

Why the Screen Became Dominant

The screen established itself as the preferred medium for digital special effects because it is programmable, reproducible, and relatively easy to control.

The same infrastructure for computation, representation, and rendering can therefore be used for cinema, video games, scientific visualization, or digital art.

This versatility made the screen the primary medium for digital special effects. Yet this does not mean that it represents their final destination.

By industrializing the digital construction of perceptible phenomena, special effects developed a logic that extends beyond the screen.

What If the Screen Were Only a Phase?

A digital representation is not intrinsically tied to the screen: it can be translated into other media.

The screen would then be less the endpoint of digital special effects than the first medium in which their logic could be industrialized.

A digital representation can already be translated into light, sound, or movement. It can control robotic objects, modify responsive spaces, or coordinate physical phenomena. The screen is therefore not the only possible destination of computation.

If forms of programmable matter were to become progressively available, the same pipeline could extend further into the physical world.¹

Here, programmable matter can be understood as physical elements capable of changing their position, shape, texture, or behavior under the control of a digital system.

Swarms of light-emitting drones already provide an elementary version of this. Each unit can be regarded as a moving point within a physical display: a pixel that has left the screen to occupy space. Reconfigurable materials, distributed robotic systems, and other emerging devices could extend this logic further.

A robotic stage set provides a more advanced example. The movements of structures, lighting, projections, sound, and atmospheric effects can be designed and previsualized in a digital environment, then executed in a physical space by coordinated systems. The digital representation no longer produces only an image: it directly organizes an event in space.

Special effects already have some of the tools and expertise required to transform a creative intention into a digital representation and then coordinate its realization. The next step would be to extend this logic to programmable physical systems.

A Discipline That May Not Yet Have a Name

What if special effects have served as a laboratory for a broader discipline?

Over the course of decades, they have developed a particular capacity: to take a phenomenon—sometimes an impossible one—as a starting point and organize its appearance in the form of a coherent perceptual experience.

At least initially, this might be less an entirely new discipline than a field of convergence bringing together digital creation, simulation, scenography, experience design, human-computer interaction, spatial computing, robotics, and physical systems engineering.

Special effects are not alone in producing experiences. Their distinctiveness lies less in the techniques considered in isolation than in their coordination around an imagined perceptual phenomenon, from creative intention to perceptual experience.

Perhaps one day we will speak of perception engineering to describe the technical production of perceptible phenomena. Experience engineering would then describe their organization within a human, spatial, and temporal context.

Beyond illusion, this discipline would extend an ambition long pursued by special effects: to transform a creative vision into a perceptible experience.

Epilogue — An Industrial Hypothesis

Three levels emerge. First, an already observable movement: tools originating in audiovisual production are migrating toward simulation and industrial applications. Second, a still partial integration: their incorporation into a more general pipeline for the production of the perceptible. Finally, a speculative projection: the emergence of an autonomous discipline and the place VFX companies might occupy within it.

Visual effects (VFX) companies are already involved in the early stages of architectural and industrial projects. The evolution envisioned here would involve moving beyond merely modeling or simulating objects and spaces to designing a complete perceptual outcome and coordinating its physical realization.

Creative intention
 ↓
Design of the perceptible phenomenon
 ↓
Digital construction
 ↓
Translation into a system
 ↓
Perceptible manifestation
 ↓
Lived experience

This migration has already begun. OpenUSD, originally developed by Pixar to assemble the complex scenes of film productions, is now used in platforms for digital twins, industrial simulation, and robotics. NVIDIA Omniverse extends this logic by combining scene representation, physical simulation, rendering, and sensor simulation.²³⁴⁵

Real-time 3D engines are following a comparable trajectory. Unreal Engine and Unity, originally developed to create interactive worlds, are now used in architecture, automotive, manufacturing, infrastructure, training, and digital twins.⁶⁷

These examples do not yet demonstrate the emergence of a general form of experience engineering. More modestly, they show that some of the infrastructure developed for audiovisual worlds is already migrating toward simulation and the design of the physical world.

This migration does not guarantee that VFX companies themselves will capture its value. Tools, methods, and skills may pass into industry without the organizations that developed them evolving in parallel.

VFX companies nevertheless have a potential advantage. Their work does not consist merely in using tools for modeling, simulation, generation, or rendering, but in coordinating teams, technologies, and processes around a coherent perceptual outcome, whether that outcome recreates the everyday or brings the impossible into existence.

Those that succeed in combining this capability with physical systems engineering, interaction design, and industrial constraints could contribute directly to a future discipline of experience engineering.