What is an immersive experience?
The definition, as recorded on Dictionary.com, is:
Noting or relating to digital technology or images that actively engage one’s senses and may create an altered mental state.
Surely there’s more involved than that?
For us the word immersive means so much more than this definition allows. It is the essence of our work and lies at the heart of everything we do. For us, immersive experiences are the past, present and future of design, and we have embraced this movement wholeheartedly. Creating an immersive experience supports the notion of storytelling in its most basic form, for every story should be believable regardless of how fantastical it may sound. Immersive design transports you from a pane of reality to a pane of another life, giving the opportunity to leave one’s persona at the door and to step into an alternative world.
Nostalgic Experiences
Immersive experiences can be long, short, complex or simple. They can throw you about, turn you upside down, make you see double or give you absolute clarity. An immersive world can trick the senses, bewitch the mind and summon emotions. Nostalgia is its best friend, calling upon memories that create new sensations.
A Window into Times Gone By
Immersive experiences give way to experience itself for it is a multisensory adventure that takes you somewhere you’ve never been before, traversing time and space. A window into times gone by, times that are and times that will be.
Exceptional Design
Any design can benefit from having a theme, especially when creating experience design, but there is a huge difference between referencing an era or tokenising a movement from the past – such as Art Deco or Masquerade – where props are used and matched with lighting as well as well-known design references, compared to a truly believable interpretation where you actually feel like you have transported back in time.
The difference lies within the design itself, the believability of the set design and authentic props from that era itself. Of course, the best starting point is discovering your location and choosing an authentic Gatsby-like party venue – the top pick of Art Deco venues in London is going to be a great place to start on your journey.
Be Authentic
You can choose to give a glimpse into the design, perhaps by simply having flapper dancers wondering around the room with huge feather props, or you could choose to disregard the clichéd expectations and showcase the real spirit of a 1920s cocktail party, with pieces from the era itself. By widening your search, you will easily find that there are suppliers who offer this authenticity, which ensures your design will be immersive because it is a real time-capsule and not a clichéd reproduction.
Technological Enhancements
Of course, there are many tools that can help you reach immersive qualities in your design. Augmented Reality Technology, is a great example of how you can easily transport the user into a new world, simply by wearing an oculus (augmented reality glasses). The advancements in virtual world technology and smart glasses technology are entirely believable, often used as a tool to convey ideas, sell concepts and enhance gamification experiences. We live in a world of instant gratification and this immediate transportation appeals to our insatiable demand for new discoveries.
Physical Immersion
Creating a physical world that is believable requires a different type of thought and careful planning. Set design has always been a fantastic way to portray different eras and to convey aesthetic detail, reliant on our hand skills to make each design beautiful and realistic. The added advantage of technologies such as CNC cutting and engraving means that design can be enhanced with detail and motifs authentically sourced from history, applied in a contemporary way.
There are wonderful sensory theories which can add a whole other layer of curiosity and intrigue, again aiding the believability of your immersive experience.
Specialist CNC laser cutting suppliers are available to help add design variety. By including this type of detail more authenticity can be reached within a theme and more textural variety can be established, thus establishing more immersion. The example here shows a design we produced where we wanted to extend the library in the background but to add unique design detail and apply these bespoke panels, thus mimicking the surroundings and creating a seamless blended design. By doing this, as designers, we are able to work in Grade 1 listed venues where we are tasked in working in prestigious, protected environments.
Multi-Sensory
It is also important, when planning an immersive experience or a multi-sensory event, to consider how each of the senses will be tapped into throughout your experience; multi sensory experiences are joyful (and incredibly popular) for the audience because the impact of the senses can be overwhelming, triggering and emotional. It’s not enough to just have a visually stimulating set design (or even something as simple as a multi-sensory experience room or multisensory escape room), but to consider olfactory sensations, taste experiences and textural variation.
For example, frequency can alter our taste buds and if served with champagne can make the beverage taste sweet or bitter, depending on how high or low the frequency being heard is. There are wonderful sensory theories which can add a whole other layer of curiosity and intrigue, again aiding the believability of your immersive experience.
Furthermore, smokes, spritzes, scents, oils, atomisers and natural habitat can offer curiosity to menu design; play with nature to provide bountiful sensory enhancement.
So, whilst it is critical to consider the senses when producing gastronomy – sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch – also consider elevations and enhancements, because the human capacity to remain curios and new specialist fields of neuroscience and cognitive psychology have offered new perspectives of understanding of what happens in our brains when other senses and experiences are stimulated.
And it’s these discoveries which have seen the impact of a brand loyalty increase by 30% when more than one sense is engaged and a massive 70% when three senses are tapped into. Simply put, your experiences must be multi-sensory if you want to engage and build customer loyalty.
We have produced the best immersive experiences in London (such as Come To Bed at The Savoy, an immersive theatre London extravaganza never seen before but we have also had the pleasure of producing work for some of the worlds leading brands who see the value of multi-sensory, immersive branding experiences. Creating an authentic link that transports customers into the product itself, thus creating a unique and entirely personal attachment ensures that each experience, and therefore the links to their specific product, can be sustained as a memory which made an impact in that moment. So, Immersive experiences UK or the world? We can help!
Immersive experiences offer so much more than a glimpse into something; you are literally thrust into the narrative and left there to explore in your own time, and when you remerge, your life and perception will have changed. It’s what we specialise in and what we love to do. This type of design is the future, especially for brands telling a story.
For advice about where to start on your journey to produce an immersive design or if you have an idea you would like to discuss then we’d love to hear from you.
