Spiers was part of a ground-breaking project working with Dstl, PA Consulting, and a team of Science Fiction writers, academics and VR specialists to stretch the imagination of defence and policy workers in a virtual reality platform called ‘Museum of the Future’. Alongside VR exhibits that are futuristic versions of things that already exist – a space-going version of a naval ship, for example – the museum houses a set of fully immersive VR ‘worlds’. These speculative settings are experimental, and are intended to highlight the uncertainty of the future, using techniques of cognitive estrangement and other appropriate narrative and world-building techniques to encourage audiences to query their anticipatory assumptions and cognitive biases. The aim of this project is therefore to promote cognitive flexibility, enhance futures literacy (FL), and ameliorate against the effects of knowledge shields.