Marti Romances, creative director and cofounder of Territory Studio SF, has created “future-facing” designs for everything from a GM concept car to the user interfaces in video games.

Romances’ studio, which is the San Francisco office of London-based Territory, has worked on films including Avengers: Endgame, Ex Machina, Blade Runner 2049, The Martian and Guardians of the Galaxy.

Territory Studio has also created futuristic designs that have appeared in video games like Forza Motorsport 6, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Cyberpunk 2077, and Marvel’s Avengers. Territory has also worked on brands, events and installations. I’m happy to note that Romances will be a speaker at our GamesBeat Summit 2025 event, which takes place May 19 to May 20 in Los Angeles this spring.

What’s cool is that designers like Romances are creating the future by designing something that isn’t real, only to fire the imagination of someone who will create something real in the future. It’s part of my favorite creative cycle, where science fiction inspires games and technology, which in turn inspire science fiction. That’s how we get creations like the Territory-designed Amazfit Verge smartwatch, which is like a Star Trek tool that measures heart rate, calories, steps, air pressure and more.

“These brands don’t want to be late because we’re building the foundations to be ready to have a minimum viable product or some prototype ready for their consumers to test when this technology is more like available to everyone,” Romances said.

Creative origins

To do this work, Romances has to draw from a range of influences, disciplines, and perspectives to create his experiences. This led Fast Company to name him one of the “100 most creative people in business” in 2019. Instead of looking at function first, Territory thinks of what could be visually appealing, Romances told Fast Company.

Romances started Territory’s San Francisco office nine years ago. And it has grown to add offices in Los Angeles and Vancouver.

“The most important part for us was to diversify what we can do and help other industries. At the beginning, we over-indexed quite a lot of our work with Hollywood,” Romances said in our interview. “And what we do with all of these directors and films is create the technology that doesn’t exist. And we’ve seen a full circle in the last eight years, and maybe by proximity with Silicon Valley, we triggered a lot of digital products that becoming real products. And this is very exciting because to us, as we’ve been imagining the future for so long. And now we are finally helping produce these real innovative solutions.”

One of Territory’s “real” creations appeared onstage at CES 2021, where GM CEO Mary Barra showed off an all-electric Cadillac car with an electronics dashboard designed in part by Territory Studio SF. It had lighting and colors that matched the driver’s mood and personality.

“Recently, we started working a lot with aerospace, which is also very exciting. Since we did The Martian, I always wanted to make the real thing,” said Romances.

From Hollywood to games and more

And Microsoft’ Seattle-based game studio Turn10 brought Territory on board to create Forza Motorsport 5 and Forza Motorsport 6. Territory helped design the aesthetic language and movement concepts for the user interface of the game. It incorporate holographic elements.

“On a macro level, I would say most of what we were doing with visual effects in these films — like everyone remembers all of the holograms we did for Avengers or these heads-up displays that appear in front of faces or even Ready Player One — are real,” Romances said. “All of these designs have informed the need eventually for augmented reality or mixed reality. We started years back even with the Microsoft HoloLens, and how we did medical projects with visualization.”

Later on, in work with Magic Leap, Territory worked on AR glasses that took the concept further and made it more practical. Magic Leap didn’t make it, but the ideas in its designs inspired designs that came later. Now those technologies, which can become visual aids for surgeons, are used in operating rooms.

For Denis Villeneuve’s film Dune: Part Two, which was nominated for Best Picture this year, Territory designed things like an animated holographic war console and a weapon reticle created for the Harkennon Mentat (a human computer).

The Harkonnen war table, featuring a highly detailed 3D holographic projection display, served as a pivotal narrative prop in the situation room which features in the opening scenes and throughout. The scenes in this set operate to inform the audience on the status of the ongoing war between the Fremen and the Harkonnen. Powered by Mentat chant vibrations, Rabban’s command center presented his army’s movements in real-time. It’s an example of attention to detail.

“Dune was very dark and very minimalist,” Romances said.

Digital twins and the intersection of simulation and entertainment

All of these designs suggest that the human machine interface isn’t done, and perhaps its best days lie ahead of us. The tools for creating powerful 3D mapping systems are here, and they’re the Unity and Unreal game engines that are used to make video games. And these tools are being used by those big corporations that are designing digital twins.

Digital twins are simulated designs for factories that are build and perfected in the digital realm first, before any money has to be committed to physically building that factory. Those factories are outfitted with sensors, and then the data is fed back to the digital twins to improve the designs. That virtuous cycle helps improve the physical factory in its next design iteration, and it’s really the same concept behind Territory’s designs over the years.

“To me, this is very powerful because we’re using real-time technologies that are usually for making games,” Romances said. “This is where territory sits between Hollywood and Silicon Valley, right? The films and games allow us to dream, to create without having to develop, which is very good because we opened our minds. We don’t have to wait for the technology to be available. And on the other side, we’re actually doing things that are more plausible.”

A lot of disruption can be the result. If hologram technology is perfected and brought down in cost, then that will disrupt advertising on billboards throughout cities.

Asked why he does it, Romances said, “We just like creating, not re-creating. When we started in this business, we realized that lots of films wanted effects like a car exploding in the middle of the road. As designers we wanted to create and we ended up finding this niche of creating for these films something that has never been seen, that has never been developed, that is not referencing an existing technology, that is trying to set a new benchmark, right, that doesn’t exist, that no one has imagined.”

He added, “And the best example is what you’ve mentioned with Minority Report. There was something in that multi-gesture, with [Tom Cruise] pinching up in the air, and it ends up being in iPads or with the sliding screen.”

He added, “We believe that all of the work that we continue to do for 14 years for Hollywood is influencing like new technologies. But we are also and be the one responsible to create some of the prototypes for these brands that want to have a wider field of view. We have been playing in this playground of everything is possible. That’s so important.”