Blackbox Infinite founder on designing positive futures and the FUI-to-real-world pipeline
May 7, 2025 with John LePore
Key Points
- Blackbox Infinite co-founder John LePore launched the design practice two years ago after observing that real-world technology has surpassed science fiction while Hollywood still renders the same glowing blue interfaces, driving his push to design positive futures instead of dystopian aesthetics.
- LePore built a viral F1 racing prototype for Vision Pro in early 2024 as unpaid spec work, demonstrating spatial computing as a real-time design environment where he can view products at human scale and iterate instantly instead of waiting for renders.
- Generative AI is displacing routine visual effects work but concentrating demand on elite practitioners who can differentiate, while the deeper concern is cultural: removing the craft process from creative work eliminates what makes it satisfying to practitioners themselves.
Summary
John Leapour, co-founder of Blackbox Infinite, built his career designing fake gadgets and interfaces for science fiction and superhero films — the discipline known as FUI, or futuristic UI. What started as visual effects work evolved into deep technology concept design, where the fictional interfaces were detailed enough to actually influence plot. Real-world tech brands noticed and started hiring him to close the gap between aspirational film visions and products that could actually ship.
Two years ago he launched Blackbox Infinite as a standalone practice, driven by a specific observation: real-world technology has stopped merely catching up to science fiction and in some areas has surpassed it — while Hollywood is still rendering the same glowing blue interfaces it has been for decades. His practice is built around what he calls designing a positive future, a deliberate push against the dystopian aesthetic that dominates both film and product design. The argument is direct: cyberpunk looks great after the apocalypse, but you have to live through the apocalypse to get there.
The FUI-to-product pipeline
Blackbox Infinite's workflow still draws on the film toolchain — After Effects, Cinema 4D, Houdini, Blender — but now layers in spatial computing. Leapour uses Apple Vision Pro as a design environment, comparing the experience to having a real-time 3D printer: he can view a hoodie design at human scale in his own space and immediately know what needs to change. The feedback loop that once meant setting keyframes, hitting render, and waiting is now close to instant.
The practice broke through in early 2024 with a viral prototype imagining how you would watch a Formula 1 race in Vision Pro. It was spec work — unpaid — built out of frustration that the first wave of Vision Pro demos showed people using a $3,500 spatial computer to look at email and PDFs. A fully functioning beta of the F1 experience exists today.
AI in Hollywood
The visual effects and animation community is under significant stress from generative AI, more so than digital product design for now, though Leapour expects that gap to close. His read on what has actually happened is more nuanced than simple displacement: okay renders are now available at the push of a button, but the elite practitioners — the ones who can produce truly exceptional assets — are busier than ever, because companies need a way to differentiate from the average. The first wave of Midjourney users who could produce genuinely good outputs were professional creative directors, people whose jobs were already built around giving clear, articulate visual direction. That pattern has held.
The concern he flags is less economic than cultural. A lot of what makes craft work satisfying is the craft itself — the process of following a vision through to a finished result. Tools that skip that process don't just change the economics; they remove something people actually want from their work.
Humanoid robotics
Blackbox Infinite has been working with companies in the humanoid robotics space on interface and face design, a problem Leapour describes as genuinely unsolved and in some cases deeply strange. His position is clear: today, humanoid robots should not have eyes and a mouth. They should signal unambiguously that they are industrial tools, not social agents. Whether they need a head at all is a real question. Safety and predictability are the near-term priorities — a point underscored by a video circulating at the time of a Chinese humanoid robot malfunctioning visibly and unpredictably.
The automotive industry gets a similar critique: most in-car digital experiences are still resolved by users plugging in their phone, and manufacturers have only recently rediscovered that people want physical buttons — a realization that will take roughly seven years to reach production vehicles given automotive development timelines. One manufacturer's solution of gluing capacitive buttons on top of a touchscreen landed as an inadvertent punchline.