Immersive experience: What is it, and how do you create it?
What is an immersive experience and why does it matter? Those two questions have circulated my mind recently as I have gotten deeper into the AR space. An immersive experience is an illusory environment that completely surrounds you such that you feel that you are inside it and part of it. The term is associated with technology environments that command the senses such as virtual reality and mixed reality. Those senses are sight, sound, and touch. We don’t have the technology to incorporate smell and taste yet, and quite frankly, I don’t think we will want that. I can imagine a bunch of fart smells, and crappy testing use cases.
What makes something immersive?
I ponder on that idea pretty often with my work because it is a powerful thing to implement. I think back to my experiences growing up learning new things. It is one thing to read about it in books, but it is another thing to interact with it. I think about all the memories I have playing video games and board games. Monopoly and Mario gave me such a robust learning experience that stayed with me because it taught me to venture out into the world and use my skills to make money and avoid risk. When I look at my experiences in traditional education, I always thought about the computer games by Blizzard that we would play in the computer lab at school. The games were focused answering correctly under time restraints. All the experiences that resonate with me were immersive.
When we look at books, they are passive learning environments. I didn’t realize that until I was introduced to YouTube and Khan Academy. Engaging with my eyes and ears changed the game. I felt that I was spending less time learning and was retaining more. Compared to text, video makes things more immersive because it incorporates more senses. Much like books only incorporate eyes, and audiobooks/podcasts only incorporate ears, video does both.
To me, immersive experiences are often confused with interactive experiences. I would argue that they are not, but they can be as you involve more senses. Listening to audiobooks, watching videos, and reading books are all passive experiences. They are immersive, but still passive nevertheless. When experiences involve touch, then they become interactive. Interactivity is tied to the concept of actions. A person must do something in the experience for it to be interactive. When you add other senses such as sight and sound, then you are completely immersed in the experience.
That often becomes the power of building XR experiences on game engines such as Unity and Unreal. The tools with the capacity for game development opens possibilities for people add interactivity to their experiences to make them more immersive. This is often what I refer to as gamification. There are different ways we experience gamification, and that is dependent on the device platform:
Augmented reality uses interactions on a screen such as toggles, sliders, or buttons. You can think of this as playing a phone game.
Virtual reality uses interactions in a completely virtual way. Because you have a headset on, you are inside the game as if you were the really character. You don’t control the character. You are the character.
Mixed reality is the combination of the two. You see the real world, but you are able to interact with the digital content because the device you use can track your hands.
I am seeing with the health education and training, the power of more immersive experiences that involve all the senses comes with a memory of the feeling you have in the experience. I recall the reasons why I remember songs more than things for tests. It is not necessarily because there is relatable story, but because the story is experienced in a particular way. I can remember the same story in a movie more rather than a book because more senses are incorporated. On top of that, I remember more games I have played than movies because there was a physical element and action associated with those experiences rather than a passive one. I think that is the evolution of learning, and why immersive experiences will pick up more especially post COVID-19. Technology is at a point where we can see 3D models on paper through augmented reality. No longer do we have to imagine what a 3D render of a 2D image looks like. We can rotate, scale, and move them around now. We can add sound and animation to contextualize the 3D model in an environment that makes sense. We can have more control over our creativity to learn more in a small amount of time.
That is the power of immersive experiences and how you can create them within the work that you do. A simple scale, move, and rotate feature with some audio and animation goes along way. We use all that already. It is a matter of use XR technology to package all them into one immersive experience.
Check out my free course on Art, Tech, and Activism in Augmented Reality: https://gum.co/OWHaN
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