What is an immersive experience?

When going to see an exhibition of Monet’s work, we all dreamed of being able to enter one of his paintings and experience his impressionist universe from the inside, to cross the Japanese bridge that separates the water feature covered with water lilies, in the heart of his garden in Giverny. Today, thanks to the magic of multimedia techniques, this dream can become a reality. This is what we call an immersive experience.

A new immersive experience?

When we talk aboutimmersion, you probably think about virtual reality. But technology does not have a monopoly on this innovation, nor does it have the precedence, like travel, novels, theater, opera, comics, cinema, television, video, virtual reality. Each of these media, with its specificities, has developed coherent, endearing universes, vectors of emotions, narrative universes lived by proxy. Today, interactive scenographies and interactive narrative frameworks plunge you into parallel universes.

With the interactive scenographies you are transplanted in another universe, the points of reference are modified, the points of view reinvented, reenchanted. Your body and brain take the plunge and enter another space/time. The immersive experience then provokes a disconnected psychological state, where the subject is no longer aware of his physical state, nor of his former environment. We forget everything, ready to feel new sensations, to experience emotions, to let our feelings express themselves, to develop our empathy or to understand the world around us in a different way.

A definition of immersive experience

Let’s remember a few key points to define an immersive experience:

• The immersive experience is first and foremost an experience, that is to say a fictional or real life experience, where what I am told or what I experience becomes the basis of my knowledge. Whether positive, negative or neutral, the experience brings about changes in the person. What I am before is not what I have become after having lived the experience.

• This experience becomes immersive if it is conceived and perceived as encompassing and multi-channel. Children do this very naturally when they invent stories and the environments in which they take place. They are then totally cut off from reality. The adult has forgotten it very quickly but keeps a small spark of it, that the interactive scenographies hope to revive.

• It is linked to a perceptive immersion. where the sense of sight is privileged but where the other senses will also be mobilized, the auditory, the tactile, the gustatory, the olfactory, the proprioception or the kinesthetic perceptions, the whole seeking to build a global coherence and a feeling of verisimilitude. This requires visual, sound, environmental and multi-sensory credibility, in order to develop a strong sense of presence (I am here, “hic et nunc”, here and now).

• The immersive experience can take very different directions, either very factual, like a documentary, in the form of a simple free or directed wandering, a discovery without interaction, in a real or reconstructed and plausible universe; or fictional in which I will live adventures and participate in events. It is then built on a work of scripting that gives substance to a story.

The keys to successful immersion in a scripted environment

The conditions of immersion, as a global experience in a scripted environment, are achieved if the context and the physical environment are conceived as a coherent continuum integrating the reception, the unfolding of the experience and the accompaniment of the exit of the experience.

This type of experience can concern all fields such as commerce, art, tourism or education and assumes different functions, sometimes mixed: artistic, educational, recreational, commercial, scientific, etc.

It is expressed in different forms, interactive scenographies, installations, exhibitions, shows, escape games, monumental projections, road shows.

Think of theimmersive experience as a magical way to awaken your audience’s desire for discovery through emotion. With Basile Bohard and his neodigital studio, a talented artist is ready to give them memorable moments.

Get in touch and talk about it over coffee!