Composer A.R. RahmanA.R. RahmanWith two Academy Awards, two Grammys, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA to his name, A.R. Rahman, the composer behind Slumdog Millionaire, Lagaan and Roja could spend the rest of his career simply scoring films. Instead, he's spent the last decade building an entirely separate creative practice in virtual reality — one most of his audience has never seen.But on July 22, Rahman launched the ARR Immersive App on Apple Vision Pro, bringing spatial storytelling and original music experiences to visionOS. The app includes three new Kathak dance performances set to Western classical pieces, a spatial-audio rendering of Clair de Lune, and a re-edited cut of Le Musk, his 360° VR film that premiered at Cannes XR years ago. I spoke with Rahman about why now is the moment for immersive media to reach a mass audience, and what a decade of building his own VR pipeline from scratch has taught him. This interview was condensed and edited for clarity and length. Why did you feel this was finally the moment for immersive storytelling to reach a mainstream audience, rather than staying confined to festivals and exhibitions?Rahman: “I think the time has come when people are so impatient and they're over-desensitized with so much information. When I first went into a VR headset, I felt like — what is this? Even a still was so engaging for me to look at, the details, the 3D of it. I'm already getting paid as a composer, so this wasn't about money. It was the thirst in me to explore more.”You’ve been working in this space for close to ten years, largely outside the public eye. What kept you going?Rahman: “We had to invent our own rigs for 3D, the frame rate, figure out what won't make people feel nauseated. Most 2D cameramen move the camera and don't understand people are going to puke if they do that. Then it just drew us in — there's a whole team with us, younger people who have now grown older with me, all believing in the project. We shot Le Musk on a camera called Jaunt, and they said just upload it and it'll stitch — and it was so bad. We literally had to take every slice and stitch it in CG. If somebody said it was going to take eight years, I wouldn't have done it. But it sucked me in.”How do you think about intimacy versus scale, as a composer who thinks in large physical spaces but is directing for a headset that’s inherently close and personal?Rahman: “I was more interested in the smaller, closer, intimate things than the bigger version of things. Sometimes very, very close, like only two inches away. My main purpose was to see how we can find a new voice in personalized, intimate storytelling. How will people experience somebody so intimately — emotionally, spiritually, romantically, musically?”MORE FOR YOUA lot of the funding and creative infrastructure in immersive media has concentrated in the U.S., Europe and China. How do you see your work fitting into that?Rahman: “We have so many stories to tell, so much wisdom from the East, but it's never presented in the right way — it's either too loud, or people ask why it should win an Oscar, why it should come from here. Because I'm multicultural, I grew up with Hollywood movies from an early age. There is no precedent for this, so don't teach me what to do — I'll do what I want to see.”Where do you see this medium heading as hardware evolves — lighter glasses, phone-based streaming?Rahman: “If it becomes this light, it'll be such a big hit. The whole idea of messing up your hair, the weight — that's the whole bummer of it. I think it's probably a heartbeat away. Even though AI is a bad word, I think it empowers countries like India in art and filmmaking — reaching places that would otherwise cost a million dollars in generative visuals. I'm against AI replacing musicians and singers and actors, but sometimes it's worth telling certain stories that don't have the budget for scale.”The ARR Immersive App is available now on the Apple App Store for Vision Pro, with a Meta Quest version planned.