What is an immersive experience?
An immersive experience is a brand moment you step into. Instead of a message delivered to a screen or a page, the audience enters a space, a room, a store window, a pop-up, a projection, a headset, a city block of screens, where the story is all around them and they are part of it. The defining feature is that the environment does the telling: light, sound, scale, objects and sometimes other people combine to put the audience inside an idea rather than in front of it.
The term covers a wide range. At one end are physical installations, from a holiday window that turns a sidewalk into a theater to a multi-room exhibition built for a launch. At the other are digital environments, virtual and augmented reality, projection mapping and interactive screens that respond to the people in front of them. Most of the strongest work combines both: a real place, with film and sound designed for it, that people experience with their whole body and then share with their phone.
Why it matters
Why an immersive experience matters
Memory is made by the senses. A film can be moving and an ad can be clever, but an experience that a person walked through, stood inside and felt the sound of becomes a memory of something that happened to them, and those are the memories that attach to a brand for years. For luxury and fashion houses, where the whole proposition is about how something feels, an immersive experience is the brand at its most persuasive.
It also multiplies. An experience built in one place is seen by the people who visit and by everyone those people show it to, so the physical event is also a content engine. Brands increasingly design the experience with its own film in mind: what the space looks like on camera is as important as what it feels like in the room, because the camera is how most people will meet it.
In practice
How an immersive experience works in practice
- 01
The work starts with the idea and the place. The creative team decides what the audience should feel and what one environment could make them feel it, then chooses or builds the space: a store, a window, a venue, a screen, a headset. Design follows, spatial design, lighting, sound, film and interactive elements, each planned for how a person moves through the space and how long they stay. Technical production is heavy: fabrication, projection, audio systems, sensors, show control and the crew to run it all.
- 02
Film and sound are usually the core. Footage is shot or built specifically for the surfaces it will play on, which may be a wall forty feet wide, a window seen from a sidewalk or a set of screens a city block long, and the sound is designed for the room rather than for headphones. The experience is rehearsed, tested with real people, opened, documented on camera and then struck. The documentation is often the most-seen artifact: a well-made film of the experience lives longer than the experience itself.
At RIOT
Immersive experiences at RIOT
Film made for a place is where we meet this form. The holiday window films we made for Tiffany & Co. were designed for the window, for the scale, the glass and the crowd on the sidewalk, rather than cut down from something made for a screen. The Red Bull Kumite work for the Times Square screens took the same approach at a different scale: content built for the environment it would live in, seen by people standing in the middle of it.
Watch out
What people get wrong about immersive experiences
Confusing technology with immersion. A headset or a projection does not make an experience immersive; a story told with enough craft that a person forgets where they are does, and some of the most immersive work uses nothing more than light, sound and a well-built room. The other mistake is designing for the visitor and forgetting the camera. An experience that photographs badly reaches only the people in the queue.
A third mistake is making it about the brand's message rather than the audience's feeling. People do not step into a space to be told something. They step in to feel something, and the brand gets remembered for having given them that.
