Integrating the Impactful Immersive Experience Team

Immersive: providing, involving or characterized by deep absorption or immersion in something (such as an activity or a real or artificial environment) — Merriam Webster Dictionary

We immerse a teabag into hot water to brew tea, but when we speak of the “immersive experience” we’re not planning to boil anyone. We may, however, make them feel as if they’d been boiled, or frozen, or hurtling through space, enjoying the beach or any of many other experiences. What we are really talking about are digital-based immersive experiences.

The First Immersive Experience

From July 1930 when Orson Welles first asked, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows …” or January 1933 when actor Brace Beemer first intoned, “Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when from out of the past come the thundering hoofbeats of the great horse Silver! The Lone Ranger rides again!” radio was the first analog immersive experience.

It was immersive because the audience employed their imaginations to add imagery to the spoken word and the sound effects. While listeners knew these were fictional tales about fictional characters, they became immersed in the stories because they exhibited what poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge first described in 1817 as “the willing suspension of disbelief.”

Coleridge posited that if a writer could infuse a “human interest and a semblance of truth” into a fantastic tale, the reader would suspend judgment concerning the implausibility of the narrative.

Television and movies leveraged that same willingness to achieve even more immersive experiences.

While these are all examples of entertaining immersive experiences, it wasn’t long before these turned up in practical applications. As an example, astronauts learning to rocket to the heavens first experienced those travels in a flight simulator that combined film imagery and audio to create the impression that the user was actually in the rocket.

Digital Immersive Experiences

The actual word “immersive” wasn’t used much until the mid- to late-1980s, a time when Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Apple, IBM and others were busily introducing new personal computers and game consoles.

Computer-based gaming was perhaps the precursor, or even the first example, of digital immersive experiences. Players often entered a catharsis in which they perceived themselves to be existing in a fantasy world. The image quality created by the software continued to become more and more lifelike and real to enhance that perception of participation.

Now retailers are beginning to leverage immersive experience technology to help customers shop by showing them what garments might look like—on themselves. Varying colors and accessories instantly by clicking at a kiosk or computer screen.

Many training courses and support activities are leveraging immersive technologies to augment the student or practitioner experience. A technician in the field can don a headset and see the support expert’s hands showing them exactly what to do and where. NASA has astronauts walking around on a virtual Mars. Students sitting at home feel like they’re in a classroom with the instructor and other students. Peloton customers mount their home spin-cycle in their family room and participate in a class now occurring in a New York studio.

Many producers of software describe the importance of the user experience to the success of their products. Citrix, for example, designed its entire product suite around the idea that the mobile user experience should closely approximate the on-premises user experience, even though available bandwidth differed widely between the two. Today’s virtual desktop experience, which manifests in many ways, follows that design ethic. It’s worth noting that Citrix continues, to this day, to find ways to improve video and audio transmissions between the data center and the user in a constant effort to enhance the user experience.

Extending the DevOps Model

Beyond the “continuous improvement” goals of the DevOps model of computer and software management is the idea that the developers who write the code and the operators who make sure it runs well on the network infrastructure must work in concert to rapidly identify, quantify and resolve all issues.

Immersive experiences take this concept further, extending the integrated team to include not only the coders and operators, but also the artists and writers who create the written, audio and visual content and the subject matter experts who assure the veracity and integrity.

Like game developers, this extended team must work together in concert to assure that the content is appropriate, the code is efficient and the delivery is continuous, flawless and totally secure. Even the slightest latency may damage the user’s willingness to believe.

Channel Choosing

This team must also determine best practices for developing and delivering experiences through appropriate, effective and impactful channels. In the 1930s, the only vehicle was radio. In the 1940s, image was added to sound with the introduction of television. Opportunities exploded starting in 1969, with the introduction of what would become the global internet.

Today we can categorize virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality and more into immersive experience options. It’s one thing to have a 360-degree camera; it’s another to put it into the hands of a talented 360-degree photographer or videographer. Developers are starting to design impactfully for Oculus Rift, Microsoft HoloLens and other immersive devices.

Even the tools people use for everyday communications are becoming more immersive. Where once you could text someone, but then had to change to other software and hardware to call them, today’s unified communication solutions create a far more immersive environment. Now you can start by texting to each other, then switch to voice and/or video with a click, share applications and edit content together with a click and even add other users by click.

How to Increase Immersion

It stands to reason that the more human senses you stimulate, the more immersive the experience becomes. Adding image to sound as we moved from radio to television certainly resulted in greater audience immersion. Theaters are experimenting with combining 3-D projection with seats that move and shake in accordance with the on-screen action. Only the olfactory sense has not been treated yet, but how long can it be before the introduction of “smell-o-vision”?

Effective creation of immersive experiences requires software developers, network designers and implementers, writers, photographers, graphic layout experts, subject matter experts, social engineers and behaviorists to work together effectively. The combined creativity in a team like that will, itself, be thoroughly immersive.

— Brad Mallard