The Future of Immersiveness

The pandemic has turned everything upside down in the past year. During the crisis, people were forced to stay indoors and do their office work from their own homes, which gave rise to a new era for immersive technologies. 

The cutting-edge tech of VR headsets has given a new dimension of immediacy to digital entertainment, but there is a much broader cultural relevance to what it means to be immersed in an activity; experiences that don’t depend on high-end gear, and forms of immersion that are not just about gaming. 

At Discover.ai we used our platform to dig deeper into the future of immersiveness. We gathered together 100+ online sources, where real people were discussing the different ways in which they were entertaining and immersing themselves everyday, and used our bespoke machine learning platform to qualitatively navigate large amounts of data.

We mixed a vast range of sources to look beyond technology and explore how different types of immersion can create new ways of being and experiencing; whether that’s how we handle challenging situations, learn new things, or entertain ourselves.

In this new report we identify four key themes that describe an aspect of the cultural relevance of immersiveness.

• Playful Solos - Immersiveness is about a space where individuals can achieve true creativity, facilitated by technological tools but also the headspace of feeling totally submerged and focused on your creative environment 
• Collaborative Creations - Immersion within virtual spaces affords plentiful opportunities for creative sandbox play and the formation of meaningful social bonds.
• Shared Spaces and 'Scapes - Immersive tech offers new avenues for connection with others, transporting us mentally to other times and places. By sharing meaningful moments, experiences can be stretched, translated and adapted in order to come together with others, wherever they are.
• Total Immersion - Sitting back and becoming immersed in content as both an active and a passive experience: satisfying the needs of traditional entertainment, education – as well as a more meditative, cathartic urge

The full report dives into each of these four areas in more detail, identifying surprising or interesting sub-themes each representing a different aspect of immersiveness. It also features a foreword by Catherine Allen, the CEO of Limina Immersive, a leading voice in the field who explains the inspiration for this project.