In this interview, Tim Kashani sits down with Kris Layng, co‑founder and Chief Creative Officer of Parallux, to explore his lifelong creative journey and his vision for storytelling in extended reality (XR). Layng recounts how early fascination with VHS movies and building miniature models of Broadway sets sparked a passion that led him to NYU Film School, work on major productions like Wolf of Wall Street and Netflix’s Maniac, and a master’s in set design. He explains his core belief that space and story are inseparable, describing how environments convey narrative and affect audience perception. Transitioning to XR, Layng highlights the shift from 2‑D screens to immersive, shared experiences, noting the challenge of translating theater’s live, communal nature into virtual spaces. He shares anecdotes about "happy accidents"—both physical (foam model mishaps) and digital (a VR glitch that levitated a set)—and how such serendipity fuels creativity. Discussing the convergence of theater and XR, he envisions a future where live performance can be experienced globally via high‑speed networks and mixed‑reality platforms, expanding access while preserving the immediacy of live art. The conversation closes with Layng’s excitement about the evolving landscape of storytelling, where XR, 5G, and collective experiences will reshape how audiences engage with narrative.
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What do you get when you have a Broadway professional and a camera crew? Long story short, you get a lot of cool info when you get Showbiz U Luminaries. Well, welcome Chris.
Thank you.
Go ahead for the camera please and just give us your name.
I'm Chris Lang. I'm a co-founder and the CCO, Chief Creative Officer, of Parallax.
That's a lofty title.
It's unbelievable.
You're known as a creative person. What was spark, like what got you into this stuff is kind of cool.
It was, it was movies on VHS tapes when I was 3 years old, and it was making little model worlds, little model sets when I was a child. I used to, from 4 to 14, I would make little— I'd see a show like Lion King or Phantom of the Opera was my favorite, or, or I'd imagine a show and I'd build it into little miniature models.
What was your first model or first—
First of all, I saw Phantom of the Opera when I was, well, in the womb, and then I saw it again when I was 4 years old. My mom saw it when she was pregnant. Michael Crawford.
Oh wow.
That was my first show ever, my first Broadway show.
The original?
And it blew my mind. I used to make the little chandelier and it fell and it'd fall and I'd be plugging in like electric lights when I was like 4 years old, and my mom would be— it was my grandfather let me have his workshop to do whatever I wanted.
How did you then turn it into this passion that you had into now what's becoming your life?
Well, when I, when I got older, I got my first movie camera when I was a teenager for my birthday, a video camera. And I made movies with the camcorder and decided I wanted to go to film school and become a director and ended up going to NYU Film School, which was my dream school. And did that. And then from there, I worked in the film industry, worked for some amazing movies like Wolf of Wall Street and some great HBO movies, and mostly as an assistant, worked as an editor, did everything, you know what I mean? You do in film, you do everything. And ended up realizing, coming back to my passion of set design and production design. So I ended up doing that and went back to get my master's in set design. Also did a lot of theater design as well, and then became an art director and concept artist and worked on some amazing projects. Worked on, um, the show Maniac on Netflix and, um, other stuff for HBO and things like that.
Talk about that creative thread, because you started by building, then you went and looked at story as a director. Yeah, yeah. And even as you evolved into production design, it all serves story.
Story and space are intertwined. They— spaces tell stories. It's stories or people moving in space and responding. So that, that relationship is always what fascinates me, and how, how space communicates story. How so much about the environment in which we're in and our proximity to each other as we go about our life. Right, says so much. You imagine a story happening in a small house or like a tenement from the turn of the century and what that must have been like to living in a giant mansion and that isolation that could come from that space between you. So this is what I'm always thinking about.
And that's a perfect segue into what you're working on now, which is understanding effectively new realities. Yeah. And how we're going to not only consume the stories that we're working on, but as a storyteller yourself, how are you— what is that relationship with the audience as they're looking at these stories using new technologies such as augmented and virtual reality?
Well, that's what's so different about XR, extended reality, or whatever, mixed reality, is because we've been consuming our media so much on a 2D surface, a screen. So the ability to now be able to walk into that, to enter into that. And then the added thing about what we're all working on is just these collective experiences, which is what's it like to be with other people while doing this thing. So, you know, VR has been around for a while, and the last 5 years it's really come back. And most of these experiences, 99% of them, were for one person at a time. So now, us theater people, how do we make it for many people?
I'm sure there's so many amazing things that you've seen, but share like one or two stories that you just went, wow, this is crazy, this is cool, how is this happening?
So in the creative process, when I was a set designer, We made a lot of physical models out of cardboard and foam. You know, you'd cut your finger off or something late at night and get a sticky dab of the foam. They glued it back on. The happy accidents are so important in the creative process. Like, you're building your model and then the cat jumps up on the table and knocks something over and you come back and you're like, "Oh my God, this is amazing. This is the set." That's so much part of our process and that's so difficult to achieve. In virtual reality because everything is so perfect, it's so clean, the edges are so sharp. So one of the greatest happy accidents that I ever had was being in VR and the thing just started glitching out and we basically— it's hard to explain— but we levitated above the set, like totally levitated above the set, and it all became this miniature thing and it was like, whoa. This is like crazy. And, and that was one of the moments, like when things go wrong, you have to be ready for it because that's, that's where the creativity is.
Hmm. Talk about the convergence between this medium called theater, which tends to be a live medium, and then these XR extended realities that we're talking about. How do you see the two converging and joining over time and the relationship between the two?
Sure. Well, The first thing is a lot of people don't have access to the kind of theater that we have here in New York. Nothing will ever replace the experience of seeing live theater. That's extremely special, a live human being up there on stage. But I think we can come pretty close. We can come closer to it than the 2D screen of videotaping theater. So I think that there's a whole world where people anywhere can experience amazing theater, whether it be live streaming with the future 5G or pre-recorded. There's a whole arena that's going to open up with this stuff.
All right, you've got your crystal ball in front of you and you think about the future of stories, future of theater, future of film, whatever they are. What excites you?
Sure, well, I think about the future somewhat, but I think about the past a lot. And I think about especially why myself and a lot of other people I work with left, I want to say, the safer world of film and theater, things that already exist, right, to do this thing that doesn't exist. And to me, my inspiration are the early pioneers of film who wrote the rules and created stories and had to invent a new language. And to me, being— I think we're all pioneers, and that's what excites me. Because these are— no one knows how to tell stories like this, and we're doing it. We're messing up a lot, we're making a lot of mistakes, but it's really exciting.
