Drew Garraway navigates the next frontier of immersive media

Image courtesy of Drew Garraway

It is a packed house at the Addition Financial Arena as thousands of basketball fans have gathered to cheer on the UCF Knights. Spectators are decked out in the team’s colors, occasionally joining in on spontaneous sporting chants. The mascot dances enthusiastically through the aisles, bringing joy to everyone’s faces, and people wave at themselves with a mix of surprise and excitement on the jumbotron. The score is close, and with only seconds remaining on the clock, the point guard flies through the air to dunk the ball. The crowd erupts in celebration, and the band strikes up a victory song.

Then the headset comes off.

The filled arena disappears in an instant and is replaced by the office of Drew Garraway. It turns out the experience was not a live basketball game at all, but rather an immersive recording viewed through an Apple Vision Pro headset.

Garraway is the co-founder and owner of Blackguard Sound, a company that records immersive audio and video experiences for use with virtual reality headsets. Together, he and his business partner Jason Strawley have spent the past 25 years producing audio content that can be heard in multiple “Star Trek” television series, Disney’s “The Book of Boba Fett” and EA’s “Need for Speed” video game, among other places. Now that artificial intelligence-generated audio is beginning to disrupt the production industry, Garraway is steering Blackguard toward the forefront of immersive media technology.

“Becoming involved in such a new industry really came out of necessity,” Garraway said. “Our safe haven is working at really high levels, things that AI can’t really do right now.”

For the past two decades, Blackguard specialized in curating wholesale sound effects libraries. However, according to a survey by McKinsey & Company, 62 percent of organizations are now experimenting with AI agents. Garraway noted that the shift toward utilizing more AI has created a noticeable hole in Blackguard’s sales.

Rather than giving up and folding, Garraway took this as an opportunity to pivot. “As AI was starting to hurt our sound effects business, we sat down and talked about what opportunities there might be. We’ve always really liked seeing what the new stuff is, and we’ve gone all in to get ahead of it,” he explained.

Strawley elaborated, “Over the years, we’ve been just a beat behind the cutting-edge technology. With immersive video, we’re right on time, and it’s taken 20 years to get to that point.”

Despite the years of dedication, risk management and success, Garraway concedes that he still deals with insecurities. “I have learned about the absolute depths of imposter syndrome. Unfortunately, I don’t think success gets rid of that,” he shared. “Meeting other professionals has been really helpful, hearing that they all go through the same thing.”

Strawley views Garraway’s accomplishments through a different lens. “Drew’s width of knowledge is very impressive. He has skill points in way more areas, and some of those areas are shockingly deep.”

Although the rapid evolution of technology introduces a lot of uncertainty, Garraway is optimistic about the potential of immersive media. “This has about as much in common with TV as TV had with radio,” he said. “This is a completely new way to consume content. Even in the worst-case scenario, people are still going to want things that were made by humans. They’re going to want things that actually feel real.”

For now, Garraway and Strawley continue pressing forward, remaining focused on all the possibilities of emerging immersive media. They are betting that the next evolution of storytelling may be found within a headset.