Immersive experiences have sprung up all over the world, but is the term being overused and in danger of becoming meaningless? Paul Milligan separates the real from the fake.
There is no doubt that one of the biggest buzzwords in the AV world right now is immersive experiences. Since the pandemic they have become a phenomenon, right around the world. There can’t be many cities left that haven’t been visited by (the vast selection of) Van Gogh experiences since 2020. The numbers are certainly impressive, if we take one venue Inavate has covered in detail, The Outernet in London, it had 6 million visitors in its first year of operation. The experience economy is predicted to be a $8.2 trillion industry by 2028, and a survey by Eventbrite found 78% of millennials would rather spend money on a desirable experience or event than buy a desirable object. So clearly there is a market there, but who is driving this market, why are there so many of them and where has this demand come from? This article will be looking at all those questions and more, including the most important question of all, just what constitutes a true immersive experience?
First of all why have immersive experiences become so popular in such a short space of time? The short answer: the pandemic is to blame. Being locked in our houses has re-ignited a desire for shared human experiences. “Post-Covid people are looking for new emotional experiences,” says Kevin Murphy, senior VP of sales and business development at Kraftwerk Living Technologies. “Immersive experiences are shared experiences for groups of families and friends, so you can go and see the same thing at the same time, you can explore
and talk about it whilst you’re actually there experiencing it, which you can’t necessarily do with some other forms of attractions.”
In an interview with culture website It’s Nice That, Alexandra Payne, the creative director at Outernet said “There’s a real desire for audiences to have a communal experience. There was a concern in the arts and culture world that after Covid nobody was going to want to do that anymore, and that there would be that real seismic shift that was already occurring to just consume art on your tablet or on your phone. I think what these immersive experiential spaces are showing us is that that’s not necessarily what people want. They want to come down and experience something in person.”
They may be the flavour of the month, but they are not new says Ed Cookson, director, Sarner International. “I would argue that dancing around the campfire with cave paintings, with people chanting, must have been an incredibly immersive experience. There’s a fundamental human condition to have very engaging experiences that take us out of, or above the real world, and we now have a new set of technologies to do it. The techniques and technologies are new, but the concept isn’t.”
Age is a factor here says Cookson: “The experience economy is booming, in terms of consumers trying to prioritise experiences over goods. This is particularly true of the under 35s. A lot of our clients are now catching up with this recognition that the younger generation are driving the popularity in immersive experiences, and they know they need a new generation of visitors to come, so we’re now seeing them embracing them. It’s been both market driven and also the clients recognising the importance of that and they’re driving it as well.”
There are three clear reasons for their current popularity says Stan Boshouwers, partner and creative director of Tinker Imagineers. “Immersive experiences have been popular forever. If you take attractions from a funfair, they’re all more or less immersive. It’s also very attractive to raise these things. They’re cheap to operate, especially since the advent of new affordable video editing software, making 360-degree content is much cheaper and everyone can do it. Also, operating them is quite easy, with four or five people you can manage content all day long. A third driver is there’s currently a new trade in IP rights going on. We did a job for the BBC featuring material from BBC Wildlife, you also have the very successful ABBA Voyage in London.”
Is the immersive experience merely an attempt for the museum sector, often seen as dusty and antiquated, to re-invent itself in a modern context? In Janet Kraynak’s 2020 book Contemporary Art and the Digitization of Everyday Life, she argues that the museum, “rather than being replaced by the internet, increasingly is being reconfigured after it”. This slew of interactive art projects certainly feels like that.
Just who is it that is pushing so many of these experiences into the market? It is media companies, venue owners, or live promoters? “It’s mostly people who either want to build an attraction or they have a space and they’re looking for something to put into it. We get approached quite often by clients that have a space within either a new build or an older building who ask what a possible digital immersive experience may be,” says Murphy. The groups driving these experiences are across the board says Cookson, and that’s what’s exciting. “Audiences want it and they go. No matter how much the venue owners wanted it, if people aren’t going to come, they wouldn’t be out there. Content is really important, so having content companies involved in different ways is important. Clients are looking at how we attract audiences of all ages, and that’s something an immersive experience does.”
Right now in the events sector, you can bet that every major city in the world will have an immersive experience of some kind on offer, but that can sometimes just mean a couple of projectors showing content on a big surface, so is the term in danger of being overused to the point it becomes meaningless? Lizzie Pocock, a producer at Treatment Studio told It’s Nice That almost every brief she’s received for the past five years has used the word ‘immersive’. “It’s almost a bit of a lazy word, a buzzword, isn’t it? It’s like, let’s do something that’s immersive. It’s perhaps an excuse to not really delve into sort of the deeper experience and the deeper reason for why you’re putting it live.”
Cookson says he’s not worried about the term being overused citing the example, “You get bad examples of every art form, you don’t stop using the word book just because there’s terrible novels around, there’s brilliant novels too. It’s much more about what we can do to educate ourselves, let’s not miss-sell the public, and tell them something is an immersive experience when it’s clearly not.”
There is no doubt that the emergence of immersive experiences has split opinion. Laura Miles, an art therapist at Alexandria Art Therapy told the Washingtonian magazine; “The experience of living inside a work of art is, for me, a unique opportunity to experience a piece on a multisensory level.” While others have described the experiences as a ‘brain massage, some were not so enthralled. “Immersive art is the latest lazy lovechild of TikTok and enterprising warehouse landlords,” said an article in Vice Magazine. In a Vulture review of Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised at Moma, it called the immersive exhibition “a glorified lava lamp”, “search-engine art” and accused it of being “nothing more than a crowd-pleasing, like-generating mediocrity”.
A lack of clear definition is a problem for the industry says Murphy. “If we take the AV industry, when we say immersive we tend to think of X number of projectors projecting onto walls and floors. But if you go to the retail world or the theme park world it’s something else. From the public’s point of view, there’s no real definition of what it means. If you do a little bit of research on immersive experiences on places like TripAdvisor you’ll see that a lot of people go and they’re not really sure what they’re there to see. And they are confused by that immersive term.”
The problem seems to be not that there are too many immersive experiences around, but there are too many ordinary or just plain bad ones around. As Murphy says: “A lot of projects seem to be a case of ‘we’ve got a warehouse, let’s fill it full of projectors’. It all comes back to what is the guest experience?” What is being delivered needs to be placed within the content of a compelling story to really immerse us, regardless of what the technology is doing. Is creating and building a gripping narrative actually the vital element of any truly immersive experience? “You don’t need a narrative. You need a compelling narrative,” says Boshouwers. “What they normally do with artworks is cut them into pieces and pull out all the fragments and then add some Pink Floyd and that’s it. When I visit one, I always look at the audiences, and they’re not truly engaged, they’re not touched by it because they are missing a good story.”
The starting point for Sarner says Cookson is a really good story and a strong narrative. “If you’re not telling the story properly or it’s not engaging in some way, it doesn’t matter what technology you use, it won’t be an engaging experience.” Boshouwers is probably best placed to gauge the success or failure of immersive experiences having been involved with the BBC Earth Experience in London (see Inavate July 2023 issue), which shut after 10 months. “We had fans and critics, and we learned valuable lesson there. In the end it turned out to be very challenging to create an experience on this scale with live action footage. Art can be enlarged and manipulated in endless ways, but animals do not interactively run away and even the highest resolution BBC footage has limits on 10m x 30m screens. Resolution will soon be a problem of the past, and tailor made shots lead to new options, but the current BBC Earth experience probably came a little bit too soon.”
If we agree that the story is vital and let’s imagine that’s in place, what are the technological components we can add to make an immersive experience really sing? “Dome projection and wide projection are still my favourites,” says Boshouwers. “It doesn’t have to be 360-degrees because 360 always has problems with the backside of the 360. I’ve had projects where so much money was spent on making it 360, but I think 180 or 270 is just as good. People choose one point to focus on because they have watched thousands of hours of television, and they know every screen has a focus so you can hang 25 screens in a row but people will choose one screen to follow the story.”
The technology has to work intuitively says Cookson, “We’ve all been on phone-based experiences where you spend half the time trying to get it to work and all of a sudden you’re not in an experience anymore, you have to remove any other distractions.”
Audio can’t be overlooked in favour of massive projection or LED visuals. It can transform any space into an immersive one. “360-degree soundscapes are the way to go but it’s completely dependent on what’s the story we’re telling? What’s the space we’ve got? Who’s the client and what needs to be done?” says Cookson. Sarner is examining a couple of audio technologies right now with an eye on future projects. “A dream we have is to engage everyone in a communal experience with ambient audio, but to be able to send dialogue directly to different people at different times. Not only would this help with languages for example, but we can also start letting people follow stories they’re interested in.” Sarner is also looking at bone conduction headsets adds Cookson. “They sit just on the temples so leave your ears completely free. The benefit for us with this is that we can send dialogue directly to one person and it can be slightly different to the person next to them, but they can still talk to each other and could also still be immersed in the wider world or wider audio scape. The reason that’s exciting is a lot of our clients don’t want to isolate people with big clunky headphones, because it reduces the communal experience. If I go somewhere with my family I want to be able to talk and share experiences together. There’s some really exciting things happening with audio on the location tracking side, so that when I walk over to one part
of the room I get a different narrative than the other part, but also in terms of the actual headsets themselves.”
Sound is important to creating an immersive experience, and the same goes for lighting too says Murphy. “When you go into an experience before you put the main projection up, you’ve got a holding pattern, so the lighting can provide the feeling of the space. Don’t just rely on the projectors or the LED. Special effects are important too, if you look at some of the best digital immersive experiences, they have smoke, mist etc. If designed well they really form as important parts of the experience as the main image.”
Scenery and set works can often be overlooked because it’s a non-technical part of the whole experience, but its importance is key says Murphy, citing a recent visit of his. “I went to a big, well known, immersive digital immersive experience recently and the thing that struck me as I approached was the theming in the corridors was awful. I didn’t feel like I was going into a special space. The main space was great, but it didn’t transport me to somewhere else, it literally felt like a big film show.”
Getting the pacing and timing right is also why some of these immersive experiences just aren’t working says Boshouwers. “Most 360-degree experiences have poor timing, you just walk in and there’s a show going on and when its finished you walk out on your own. It’s very important to have this story aligned, in terms of tension building up to a finale and then an exit. That’s the key.”
There is no doubt immersive experiences have always been here, we just now have a cool new name for them. The problem with this new term, and this happens with all technology trends, is that people will latch on to it to make a quick dollar, regardless of its relevant or not. We’ve all been to (or seen online) sub-standard immersive experiences. There isn’t much we can do about them apart from raise a collective groan. What the AV industry needs to do going forward, and luckily this is something its historically really good at, is to make sure
the story you are telling is engaging and the technology lifts the experience, not detracts from it.