Narrative at the heart: How experience is leading AV evolution

• Features

• 22/06/2026

India is a nation of storytellers. From the devotional tableaux of its temples to the oral traditions of its nomadic peoples, the impulse to capture and transmit experience runs deep in the culture. It is no surprise then to see modern, Indian attractions and entertainment putting story and narrative at the centre of the experience they want to deliver.

Siddharth Batla of Design Factory India and Amardeep Behl of Design Habit have spent their careers building narrative-driven experiences — from museums and monuments to urban spectacles — that use technology as a means, not an end.

In a recent conversation with Inavate India, both designers were emphatic on one point: content and narrative now drive every decision, including the technological ones. For an industry built around hardware and integration, this represents a fundamental reorientation for how AV operates.

The story is the brief 

Siddharth starts the conversation: “What we do is try to figure out the story behind anything we want to do and reflect on what that story is for us and for the audience. A lot of the time, we start from the end — what is the final aim for the visitor to get out of it?”

Amardeep describes a process that is similarly content led. For him, space itself is the medium through which a story travels, and the role of technology is to make that journey as powerful as possible. He says: “It’s about getting that big idea across, and the big idea has to be nurtured. You delve deep into content, create a narrative, get a story, and start seeing it fitting into space. Once the idea is there, you bring in the vehicles: technology is one, craft is another. What we want from the visitor is to be emotionally moved by the content — and
for that, we will do just about anything it takes.”

The practical consequence of this approach is that technology is no longer the starting point. The question has transformed from “what can this technology do?” to “what does this story need?” and this distinction has significant implications for how AV professionals in India are positioning themselves.

A project that illustrates this story-first philosophy clearly is the Smritivan Earthquake Museum in Bhuj — a 6,500 sq m institution that Design Factory India was commissioned to design on the theme of the 2001 Gujarat earthquake. Siddharth explains how the story became the brief: “On the first day, we were supposed to do a museum on an earthquake. But at the end of seven to eight months of designing, we figured out the museum is not about the earthquake. It turned out to be a place celebrating the resilience of the Kutchi people.”

Technology and craft became vehicles in service of that larger narrative. Each gallery was treated as a different expression of local artisanship, with technology layered on top. Siddharth noted: “On day one,
we were not thinking that we want to do a craft museum or a technology museum. These were just vehicles that came in once we got into the bigger picture.”

For Rishubh Nayar, director at Christie Digital Systems India, this is precisely where manufacturers need to play a more thoughtful role. The job is not to push product, but to understand what a given story requires.

Rishubh says: “Our way of bridging the gap between creative intent and technical execution is to ensure the technology empowers what the creatives envisage. We give them the right mix of technology, identifying where the right fit for projection or LED is. If a space has the right technology, it becomes part of the environment and users enjoy the experience and don’t see the hardware.”

Local flavour 

India does not simply replicate Western models of themed entertainment — it is doing something different, rooted in a distinct set of cultural logics. Siddharth is direct on this point: projection mapping in India is not the same discipline as projection mapping in Europe. The audiences are different, the emotional registers are different, and the density of cultural content that underpins these experiences is different.

Siddharth says: “If we compare projection mapping shows in Europe and projection mapping shows in India, they are completely different. If you do a show in the European style in India, it’s not going to have the same resonance. Even Indian temples are museums to me — you have artifacts, dioramas, lighting, live events, storytelling, and a priest who is essentially an usher. Our Indian ethos is totally different, and it is not different for the sake of being different — it is culturally different.”

Amardeep frames this cultural specificity through the lens of an audience segment that is attractions want to appeal to: teenagers. In his view, the challenge of designing experiences for a generation raised on social media and five-second attention spans is real — but so is India’s advantage. 

Amardeep says: “India has content like no other country. We have thousands of years of content — spiritual, physical, mental, emotional. But how do we reach out to those youngsters? How do we make our stuff actually exciting for them?” His answer is immersion. The moment an experience becomes fully immersive, it engages the body as well as the mind and the audience is drawn in. Amardeep says: “The moment you add the word immersive, you’ve got the audience into a space and you’re working with that person’s entire senses. That’s where the challenge is, and that’s where the fun is. The moment you go immersive, you automatically bring in all kinds of tech — you build sets, you place the tech, and you tell the stories. It’s all about giving punches.”

Rishubh echoes the sentiment from a manufacturer’s perspective, noting that the Indian market is not simply a scaled-down version of global markets — it is its own thing, with its own creative ambitions. He says: “We don’t have the ‘Disneys’ and ‘Universals’ of the world right now, but these experiences have been created in our own image in tier-one and tier-two cities. These spaces are no longer white elephants; some are attracting footfall of up to 3,000 people every day. What amazes me is that we can depict our culture, our religion, and experiences India has faced as a nation through spectacles.”

The right tech call

Perhaps the most technically consequential discussion to emerge from recent evolution of attractions concerns the question of how projection and LED — long treated as competing technologies — should work in spaces. Attitudes to the two technologies have evolved, with projection and LED both having defined applications they excel at. But new attractions are pushing AV professionals and creatives to try and have LED and projection exist in the same space and rooms, seeking to use the interplay between the technologies to create a new experience.

Both Siddharth and Amardeep have experimented with this, and both are convinced that convergence is coming, even if the technical and creative challenges have not yet been fully resolved. Amardeep’s characterisation of the two technologies is evocative: “LED is evolving like crazy — you can curve it, make any form with it you want, make it bigger, larger, finer. Projectors, on the other hand, are also improving. They’re workhorses. It’s almost as if LED is the loudmouth and the projector is like gentle poetry — very impactful at the same time. So, there are clear differentiations of what LED can do and what a projector can do.”

He has attempted to blend the two, with mixed results. The attempts failed because of the fundamental tension between the harshness of LED and the softness of projected light. But the lessons learned from these attempts are informing his future pursuits. Siddharth raises a specific obstacle to the integration of projection into fully immersive environments. Current projection technology cannot compete with ambient or natural light, which restricts its use to controlled dark spaces, limiting how it can be deployed within a larger, mixed mood experience.

He says: “Projection is becoming smarter, partly because the threat which LED posed to projection technology meant that we had to invent faster to catch up. Today, Christie is touching close to 60,000 lumens out of
one box. Contrast ratios have improved to the point where black is genuinely black. The biggest drawback from an architectural perspective is that designers do not want ugly boxes being visible — but today, you can put a projector above a ceiling and create an immersive environment where the projector isn’t visible to any viewer.”

He continues: “LED and projection are both evolving, and because each has presented a threat to the other, the pace of development has accelerated. We’re seeing transparent LEDs, textured LEDs, and 0.6mm pixel
pitch entering the market even though 0.9mm became available only two years ago. It’s an exciting time for both technologies.”

The conversation between designers and technology points to a maturation in how India’s attractions and entertainment sectors are thinking about themselves. The days of spec-led procurement — in which a project was defined by the brightness of its projectors or the pixel pitch of its LED — are giving way to something more considered.

What Siddarth and Amardeep describe is a creative process in which AV technology enters the conversation not as a category but as a capability — something assessed against what the narrative requires. For manufacturers and integrators operating in this space, that requires a different kind of engagement. It is not enough to demonstrate technical superiority; the argument must be made in the language of story, emotion, and experience.

Amardeep concludes simply: “It is not technology for technology’s sake — it is technology for impact.” That distinction, perhaps more than any specific product development, is what is set to define the next chapter of Indian attractions. The technology that earns a place in these spaces will be the technology that understands its own role: not to impress, but to disappear into the story.