Immersion is Absolute

In the English language the concept of immersion allows no qualification or quantification. It is an absolute. You are never more immersed or less immersed, well immersed or poorly immersed. You are either immersed or you are not.

A workaround for this absolutism is to carve out a part and call it a whole. Your toes are immersed in the cold lake water, but the rest of you remains dry.

For the term, immersive media, how does the dictionary definition square with usage?

While it would make no sense to say you were partially immersed in a media experience, it would be proper to say you felt immersed during certain scenes. The parts you have carved out for immersion are segments of time.

Here's a question: Would I claim, having recently plunged into an assortment of media offerings all grouped under the category, immersive media, that the intensive three day exposure felt immersive? Here's my answer: I felt immersed at times.

To be fair, critical detachment primes a person to be pulled out of the water at the slightest pretext.

The immersive media included stereo 3D watched on a 47 inch diagonal flat screen, stereo 3D watched on a multiplex sized screen, and stereo 3D watched on an IMAX screen, plus features shown on a full planetarium dome.

My observations in this post are solely about the media platforms mentioned above, with an additional platform, my own monitor, brought in for comparison. The discussion is content agnostic, but it is not technique agnostic. Specific titles are not relevant, specific production techniques must be mentioned.

What does it mean to say you felt immersed in a medium? In simplest terms, a media experience is immersive if it shuts out your awareness of all rival stimuli. You forget the viewing space, you no longer notice the people seated nearby, you put out of mind any distracting thoughts, you don't wonder how the movie was made. You are not looking at a production manufactured for viewing on a screen, rather, you are within a subsuming environment of sights and sounds that carries you along on its own currents. When immersed, you might feel surrounded, you might feel absorbed, but you never feel detached.

By these criteria, I thought IMAX 3D felt immersive most frequently, when the stereo 3D technique used the negative parallax volume in front of the screen.

The effectiveness of IMAX 3D owes to multiple factors designed to eliminate distraction. The immense size of the screen extends to peripheral vision. The seats are mounted on steep risers fairly close to the screen. The speakers behind the screen fuse auditory and visual attention. Without utilization of the spatial volume in front of the screen, however, IMAX 3D is just a very large picture window. When action in negative parallax puts depth within reach, you are immersed.

A 3D venue at the local multiplex, or a very large 3DTV. could approximate this effect in a darkened theater space when the content technique places image depth in front of the screen and the viewer sits at a distance from the screen equal to or somewhat less than the screen width.

For a couple of weeks after the event, this is where my assessment stood, until I viewed a number of HD GoPro videos recently.

The GoPro videos were not in 3D but they used the full frame fisheye default setting for the camera. They all showed an extremely wide scope of view, the cameras were all mounted on a moving platform, usually a person performing an extreme sport in spectacular scenery, and I watched them all at full screen 1080 HD on a 23 inch diagonal monitor from three feet away, in a room illuminated by indirect daylight.

Initially, I watched these without bothering to put on my headphones. Much of the time I felt melded with the camera, fully present in the action. I was pulling backflips on a dirtbike, I was leaping off a cliff in the Alps, I was free diving in the Caribbean, I was motorbike touring across the Himalayas.

I put on my headphones and watched the videos a second time. The immersive feeling vanished. With the headphones off again, the immersive feeling returned.

Revelation forces reassessment. Wide camera lens angles of view are just as important to immersion as wide personal angles of view in the theater. A moving point of view creates an immersive sense of spatial volume. An image without artificial intrusion from narration or music is more absorbing, although environmental sound might enhance the sense of presence.

Most importantly, these factors inherent in the technique of the content itself, can trump factors designed into the display technology. I felt immersed in a room illuminated by daylight, viewing 2D on a relatively small screen.

In the near future, when immersive imaging best practices are combined with an ideal immersive display to tell a compellingly immersive story, will technology present the ultimate immersive experience?

On my porch through the wee hours of a night six years ago, I began reading by headlamp the last novel in the Harry Potter series, purchased minutes earlier on the midnight of its release. For several hours of autumnal darkness the real world, including my own body, ceased to exist. I was immersed while reading printed words in a book.

The ultimate immersive experience is not dependent on any particular technology, it is dependent on the user's commitment.