How this former Disney Imagineer is shaping the next generation of defense technology

The way Bran Ferren sees it, the future of warfare depends as much on creativity as it does on raw firepower.

The former head of research and development at Walt Disney Imagineering—the elite R&D arm responsible for the entertainment empire’s “secret sauce”—the 72-year-old Ferren has spent decades building a reputation for fusing art, design, and storytelling with serious technical and engineering know-how in pursuit of novel innovations and experiences. This pioneering approach to “creative technology” is the heart and soul of Applied Minds, the company Ferren cofounded 25 years ago to help clients from the Pentagon to Fortune 500 companies envision and test breakthrough technologies before they even realize they need them, from rapidly prototyping advanced robotics and vehicles to designing futuristic command centers and immersive simulators. If you can imagine it, chances are the artists and engineers at Applied Minds can make it a reality.

Now, with the United States gearing up for its next big war, Ferren and Applied Minds’s unique brand of prototyping has never been more important. In a defense sector often constrained by bureaucracy and incremental improvements, the company’s ability to think outside conventional silos and pull insights from unexpected fields—whether theme park design, Hollywood special effects, or commercial tech—offers a much-needed jolt of creative problem-solving and gives Applied Minds an edge in a defense landscape that increasingly demands speed and creativity over incremental improvements. 

“We’ve turned into, for lack of a better word, an imagineering resource for hire,” says Ferren in a recent interview with Fast Company.

The son of two artists, Ferren grew up “surrounded by people doing art and technology,” whether it was uncle Roy Ferren, the director of flight test for North American Aviation (now part of Boeing), or uncle Stanley Tonkel, the prolific Columbia Records recording engineer who helped produce tracks for famous musicians from Miles Davis to Frank Sinatra. 

Ferren’s early career encompasses a constellation of creative endeavors. In the 1970s and 1980s, he cofounded Associates & Ferren, a design and special effects firm that quickly rose to prominence for its work in film, theater, and high-tech installations. The company contributed to several Hollywood productions, providing innovative visual effects for movies including Altered States (1980), Little Shop of Horrors (1986), and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), as well as special effects for Broadway plays like the Sherlock Holmes mystery The Crucifer of Blood and major concert performances by Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd, R.E.M., and Depeche Mode, among others. Ferren distinguished himself by marrying the theatrical and the technological; among his more unusual projects includes orchestrating a nationwide tour of the Bill of Rights to mark the bicentennial of the document, a task that involved designing and building a special transportation vehicle from the ground up to house the fragile artifact as well as a traveling exhibit space to accompany it. 

“I really love doing new things that I’ve never done before and that other people haven’t done before . . . theater, film, rock ’n’ roll touring. These were all early venues where you had the opportunity to do that,” Ferren says.

His expertise in blending technology with storytelling caught the attention of Disney, leading to the acquisition of his company in 1993 and his installation as head of R&D at Walt Disney Imagineering, which is responsible for master planning all of the company’s far-reaching creative endeavors, including theme parks. 

“Theme parks are story driven,” Ferren says. “It’s about bringing you into those stories.”

Ferren’s group was also responsible for prototyping and demonstrating next-generation products for Disney executives to provide insight into the technological trends shaping the entertainment industry, including desktop gaming consoles, ebooks, and on-demand digital video delivery. Ferren likens the role of Imagineering at Disney as “the defined job of what ARPA or DARPA is for the defense community,” which is “to prevent surprise,” he explains.

“Imagineering was my home, but also from my perspective, my job was: How do I help bridge between different worlds, such as Silicon Valley and such as Hollywood, who often have very compatible goals, but speak different languages?” he adds.

Always in search of the next big thing, Ferren left Disney in 2000 to cofound Applied Minds with computer scientist Danny Hillis, whom Ferren had previously recruited to Disney as a fellow in 1996, and entrepreneur Doug Carlston. Since then, the company has worked with major players across virtually every industry you can think of, from automakers General Motors and Ford and agricultural giant John Deere to geographic information systems pioneer Esri and defense primes like Boeing, as well as every branch of the U.S. armed forces. (The company declined to share the total value of its contracts but stated that it’s roughly an even split between military commercial clients).

In the process, Applied Minds has notched more than 1,000 patents that encompass everything from full-color and enhanced 3D night vision devices, customizable instrument control panels, immersive display environments, centralized controls for autonomous vehicles, modular vehicles, and even portable systems for communicating underground—the latter of which is of particular interest to the U.S. military ahead of a future conflict.

Applied Minds made a splash from the get-go. In what might be the company’s most significant early innovation, Ferren and Hillis would end up playing a pivotal role in the development of “pinch-to-zoom” technology, the now-ubiquitous multi-touch gesture interface used on smartphones, tablets, and other touchscreen-based devices. (The pair’s 2005 patent was at the center of a high-profile 2013 lawsuit which saw consumer electronics juggernaut Apple accuse competitor Samsung of infringing on its own patents, including pinch-to-zoom, which the former had popularized with the launch of the iPhone in 2007; Apple’s lawsuit was invalidated based on Ferren and Hillis’s existing claim to the technology.) 

Applied Minds also established deep roots in the defense world. Among its most notable projects are the Photographic Landing Augmentation System for Helicopters (PHLASH), developed in 2007 to help prevent brownouts during dicey helicopter landings in the deserts of the Global War on Terror, and the U.S. Army’s Expeditionary Lab, a mobile workplace designed to help soldiers engineer technical fixes on the fly while deployed overseas. The company has provided the Pentagon with prototypes for advanced combat vehicles, sophisticated cockpit interfaces for the military’s upcoming sixth-generation fighter jets, next-generation workstations to streamline operations, immersive simulators to improve training, and new approaches to data visualization that look like they’re ripped straight out of a science fiction movie; it even participated in the Pentagon’s ill-fated effort to build a real-world “Iron Man suit” to protect troops engaged in high-intensity combat.

Among Applied Minds’s latest victories is a critical fix for the U.S. Air Force’s next-generation KC-46 Pegasus tanker, considered a critical aerial refueling capability for extending the range of tactical and transport aircraft amid a high-intensity future conflict. Unlike traditional tankers, which feature a boom operator positioned at the tail with a direct line of sight of a target aircraft for the delicate dance of lining up the refueling boom, the KC-46 instead transmits digital imagery from the so-called Remote Vision System (RVS) to operators at a high-tech Aerial Refueling Operator Station nestled in the body of the aircraft. But initial testing had revealed that the RVS feed was marred by image distortion, inconsistent lighting, and depth perception issues that made it consistently unreliable during refueling operations. Without an accurate picture of the outside world to work from, operators simply can’t do their job, rendering the KC-46’s core mission of keeping other aircraft fueled and ready to fight effectively moot.

At the behest of Boeing, the prime defense contractor on the system, Applied Minds eventually rolled out a fix in the form of the RVS 2.0, which features enhanced cameras and a full-color high-definition display to improve depth perception and counteract glare and shadow.

“Now, you’d say, ‘Clearly the U.S. Air Force Research Lab and Boeing and Rockwell Collins were working on this, they don’t need a few more engineers and computer scientists to solve things.  . . . Why would we have expertise in this?’” Ferren says. “It’s because we actually come from the film business, so some of us have expertise on how you make good looking images.”

While Applied Minds operates in the defense technology space, it doesn’t function like a traditional defense contractor. Instead of competing for massive military contracts or manufacturing hardware at scale, the company has positioned itself as an elite think tank and prototyping powerhouse, working on a project-by-project basis and helping organizations rapidly develop creative solutions to complex technical challenges. This approach allows the company to remain agile, moving between industries while maintaining a small, highly specialized team of engineers, designers, and technologists.  

Indeed, those skills Ferren honed as head of R&D at Disney Imagineering—architecting immersive, intuitive experiences—translate surprisingly well to a military context. To wit: One of the Applied Minds’s specialties is the development of military command centers, those high-intensity spaces where critical information and life-or-death choices collide. The company has designed installations including the U.S. European Command (EUCOM) Command Center in Stuttgart, Germany; and the U.S. Air Force (now U.S. Space Force) Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California; in 2023, the Naval Postgraduate School Foundation contracted the company to help develop its Naval Innovation Center to serve as a central node for R&D for the Navy and Marine Corps. As it turns out, designing a cutting-edge military operations center isn’t so different from creating an immersive theme park attraction for Disney: You’re shaping the user experience, guiding decision-making, and ensuring everything works intuitively under pressure

And it’s not just the military interested in building such spaces: Fast Company has learned that Applied Minds is currently engaged in work to design a Monitoring, Analysis, Restoration Center (MARC) for Virginia-based energy company Dominion Energy to help deal with extreme weather events and a “customer engagement center” for Amazon Kuiper Government Solutions, the tech subsidiary focused on boosting broadband connectivity through a sprawling satellite constellation in orbit. 

But these command centers aren’t just about functional utility, but creating environments that are themselves conducive to collaboration and innovation. After all, the company’s core philosophy is focused on helping other organizations “develop creative concepts to solve problems,” as Ferren puts it—which, in turn, means helping other organizations become more organically innovative themselves. Applied Minds doesn’t just exist to build cool shit, but to empower organizations traditionally stymied by their own institutional limits (like, say, rigid R&D pipelines and other bureaucratic hurdles) to embrace creative technology and foster their own long-term innovation ecosystem.

“The throughline is storytelling and how you do it in different forms: how is that an enabler to a whole variety of other innovations in technology, in organizations, and such?” Ferren says. “And then how do you create both virtual and dimensional spaces that are capable of doing that better. I mean, the story is the play. The theater is the venue when both of them work.”

Nearly a decade after the Air Force first discovered issues with the RVS, the system is still proving a headache for the service: As of March 2024, the second iteration of the system was still behind schedule due to unspecified “supply chain issues” among various Boeing subcontractors, according to Defense News. But to Ferren, the project was particularly illustrative of Applied Minds’s vision: to develop fresh solutions to serious challenges through the careful marriage of creativity and technology. 

“This was a technically hard problem, but it didn’t require a brute force technical solution,” It required a different way of doing it, and so we were able to come in orthogonally,” Ferren says of the RVS 2.0 project. “So rather than being focused on what the technical requirements are in the details, we come in and say, ‘You know, there are different techniques that can be used to do this.’ And we built proof of concepts, and we’re able to demonstrate it for them.”

Applied Minds’s unique blend of storytelling, design, and engineering has positioned the company as an indispensable force in the future of national security. And in an era of rapidly evolving threats, the U.S. military appears increasingly inclined to rely on tech outfits who understand both the art and science of problem-solving, who can take inspiration from theme parks and film production as readily as they can from aerospace engineering to find novel solutions to the most pressing challenges facing the nation.

Ferren and his team have spent decades proving that the best solutions often come from unexpected places. As the challenges of modern warfare grow increasingly complex, so too does the need for Applied Minds’s brand of creative innovation. If the future of defense belongs to those who can imagine—and build—the impossible, then Applied Minds is already leading the way.