What do we mean when we talk about immersive media? And why is that a relevant question?

Last weekend I attended Reality Check: Lightroom – Building the Future of Immersive Storytelling at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. The opening panel, moderated by Karen Cirillo from XRMust dove straight into these existential questions.

To start with the latter: definitions matter, as they shape opportunities for making and presenting work, funding priorities, exhibition cultures, educational programs, ethical frameworks, as well as the aesthetics of the experiences made.

To address the former: that question can be approached at several levels, each leading to a different understanding of why immersion matters.

Here are four perspectives that I took away:

1. An aesthetic dimension

Immersion is first of all an aesthetic capacity of art: its ability to captivate audiences and draw them into fictional or experiential realms. In the panel, Dana Melaver (Dok Neuland, Leipzig) described this as the power of art to be captivating —the experience of losing oneself in a story world or sensory environment.

This can be a highly individual and disembodied mental state, as when reading a novel makes you forget the world around you. But, as Ian Biscoe reminded us, it can also be a collective and embodied experience: think of audiences in a cinema or theater laughing, crying, or holding their breath together.

While technologies such as VR have often been promoted as uniquely suited to produce this kind of immersion - “empathy machines”-alert - I'd say that immersion is a quality shared by all art forms: from travelling bards and medieval cathedrals to Mark Rothko and Werner Herzog (chatgpt's suggestion for a cinematic equivalent of the travelling bard).

A more critical reading is possible as well. Much VR immerses us in virtual worlds precisely by isolating us, disconnecting us from our bodies and from the social and physical environments we inhabit.

This aesthetic lens opens up a range of fruitful questions:

• What specific qualities of a medium captivate audiences?

• What are the psychological implications of immersion?

• What role do embodiment and disembodiment play?

• And to what extent does this immersion connect or isolate us?
  

2. A disciplinary dimension

Immersive media can also be understood as a (sub)discipline: a label that distinguishes a field from adjacent practices. Such a label makes artistic work recognizable to funding bodies, policy organizations, and cultural institutions. It enables the formation of canons, archives, academic fields of inquiry, and educational programs.

This process of institutionalization has clear benefits. It helps build communities of practice in which makers can learn from one another and develop shared vocabularies. It also creates pathways for new generations to master the medium.

Yet it is also tricky. Makers often resist categorization, especially in emerging fields that evolve rapidly. What, exactly, should define immersive media as a discipline? Is it characterized by particular technologies of 3D representation? Or should it be defined in experiential terms?

Melaver suggested that immersion is about creating experiences that replace or overlay existing realities. In a similar vein, Sanneke Huisman proposed that the positioning of the viewer within the artwork might be a key characteristic.

These discussions reveal that the disciplinary borders of immersive media are still very much under negotiation, while also being porous with other disciplines. Insightful were Huismans references to modern art from the 1960s, for instance the work of Robert Morris invited visitors to wander through his minimalist sculptures in the gallery space.

An economic and performative dimension

Immersion is also a set of cultural and economic practices. Even if artists prefer undisciplined freedom, cultural fields are structured by concrete infrastructures for production, funding, and presentation. Audiences, too, have expectations shaped by these structures.

Presenting a work in a theater, a museum, a festival, public space, or via an app store for VR headsets involves very different modes of production, distribution, and revenue. At the moment, immersive media seems to be branching out in multiple directions, such as:

• a performative trajectory that aligns with cinema and theater

• more open ended generative and/or interactive installations in public space

• installations for dedicated gallery/ museum spaces etc.

• platformized distribution for at-home experiences through headsets or screens, via app stores, online content libraries, streaming services etc.

Understanding immersion from this angle helps us recognize these diverging paths and think about how to build sustainable exhibition cultures for each ot them. It could also help to “educate” audiences about what they can expect from different formats and contexts.

4. A societal dimension

Interestingly, a fourth perspective was largely absent from the discussion—perhaps because this was, after all, a film festival, not a a sociology or critical theory conference.

This view treats immersion not primarily as an artistic technique, but as a broader cultural condition. We already live in a world in which we are continuously immersed in media: through smartphones, social media feeds, smart-city algorithms, digital maps, recommender systems, and chatbots whispering in our ears (well, that's still mostly a movie). And then there's the promise of augmented reality and a blockchain-enabled metaverse -anyone?- this could make such futures even more prominent.

From this perspective, everyday life is becoming a hybrid experience: a physical world overlaid with algorithmically curated or AI-generated layers—populated by avatars, assistants, agents, and virtual companions.

This raises urgent ethical and design questions:

• Who decides what these layers look like?

• Who is included and who is excluded?

• What mechanics and aesthetics shape such hybrid environments?

• And how can they be designed in the public interest?

• Upcoming research projects

Upcoming research projects

I’m curious to hear whether this framing resonates with others.

From our side, we will be exploring some of these questions further in the next two years. Our Civic Interaction Design research group has recently become involved in two new artistic research projects funded through the Dutch CIIIIC programme.

Thuis (“Home”) is a collaboration with AffectLab , Fillip Studios, Introdans , and Utrecht University. In this project, we will investigate the design of embodied immersive media in public spaces, exploring how such installations can foster deeper sensations of connection and belonging.

Shared Realities is a collaboration with International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) , MIT Open Documentary Lab , POPKRAFT , Polymorf , Studio Biarritz, WeMakeVR.com , ARTIS Planetarium, ALLLESSS ( Ali Eslami ), Ado Ato Pictures ( Tamara Shogaolu ), @Cassette (Nu:Reality), and PHI ( Myriam Achard ). Here we will explore collective forms of immersive storytelling from the perspectives of distribution, narrative/ experience design, and audience experience.