Welcome to a brave new world of immersives: are you ready?
It’s on everyone’s lips in the cultural and tourism sector. Immersive experiences are popping up everywhere – defining a new frontier of creative practice and showcasing an expanded language of audience engagement.
While we’re all being wowed by the bright lights and colourful rooms, there is a much broader and important shift in audience expectations and cultural business models at play. Are we paying attention to what this could mean for the culture and tourism sectors more broadly?
The concept of ‘immersive’ may seem new, but in fact it is not. As early as the dawn of the moving images, audiences were captivated by projections. In fact, in the early days of cinema, movies had no plot. It was about capturing everyday moments like a horse running or a man watering a garden and playing them to an audience. Cinema was inextricably tied to magic and illusion and this captivated audiences. Recent visits to the Cinematheque Française and the Cinema Museum in London confirmed that the power of escapism and delight of immersive media has been recognised for a long time.
Left Bank Co. director Michelle has visited about a dozen of contemporary immersive experiences in the past few months. There is definitely a diverse field with different organisations and businesses trialing very different approaches; it’s clear that it has become a strategic and business imperative for places, museums, heritage sites, tourism destinations and shopping centres. The audience pull towards these types of experiences is immense: priced on average around AU$ 30-40 or higher, booked out weeks in advance, the immersives sector has well and truly taken off overseas and is starting to do so in Australia. There is even a range of immersive-specific industry events and trade fairs, evidencing that this is being taken seriously as a business model.
Atelier des Lumière’s The Egypt of the Pharaohs
Looking at this from a strategic perspective: what are the reasons one might consider investing in and delivering an immersive experience? What is the detailed calculus that is going to make such a proposition sink or swim? What benefits may it deliver for an institution or destination? What are the drawbacks to be conscious of? This article proposes key arguments in the debate about immersives that every aspiring client or collaboration should be aware of.
It must be said that we recommend reading this piece in conjunction with the very excellent and highly detailed overview of this landscape authored by our friend and colleague Peter Tullin of Remix. This practical piece piece builds on Peter’s findings in his seven-part essay developed in collaboration with the British Council.
Here are the main arguments to consider immersives alongside a range of audience engagement strategies:
#1 They have strong revenue potential
In an age where cultural institutions are looking for revenue streams to shore up their sustainability, the revenue generating potential of immersives cannot be overlooked. Despite cost of living pressures, these experiences are able to set high ticket prices and attract high visitation. Immersives in both Paris and London must be booked days if not weeks in advance due to demand. It must be said that there usually is a sizeable production investment at the outset for these and that profits only start to accrue after a few years of operations but there is a willingness to pay to see the extraordinary and spend a day out with the family.
#2 They’re bringing non-visitors to heritage and cultural sites
While the purists will look down on the educational and scholarly value of many immersive productions, the fact remains that these types of experiences aren’t designed for the curators themselves or for captive museum audiences. They’re designed to broaden the appeal and increase the accessibility of cultural organisations by highlighting one aspect or a specific story in their collection. The evidence from Aura Invalides shows that Cultival (an integrated promotion, sales, production platform who pitched the idea to the dust-gathering Musée de l’Armée) was able to dramatically increase the visitation of the Dôme des Invalides. Figures from September to January show that over 50,000 tickets were sold and 80% of visitors were locals.
#3 They’re enabling and normalising a digital engagement with culture which is more logistically viable than touring and sometimes wholly appropriate
While nothing beats appreciating the original artifact that was touched by the artist himself, the environmental impact of only holding out for the Real Thing (either by travelling the seven seas or waiting for the exhibition to tour to a place near you) is increasingly untenable in a future where we need to pay greater attention to environmental footprint. Immersives and other digital initiatives are using latest 3-D scanning, projections, virtual reality and AI amongst other tools that are making digital replicas of objects and places increasingly engaging. Further investment and research in this area will prime audiences for this shift towards more sustainable touring practices and eventually object repatriation and digital loaning where that is appropriate and feasible. Lightroom in London actually created original digital artworks with David Hockney rather than only replicas of his pasts works in other media. The possibilities are exciting in this field.
#4 They’re changing the format and approach to consuming culture
One of the biggest shifts in the post-Covid cultural landscape has been this focus on planning outings in advance, thus making it virtually impossible to make spontaneous decisions about what to visit. Not only has the lead up and anticipation for a visit been codified but so has the length of time people are willing to spend. Most experiences run in a 40-50 min loop, probably a length of time arrived at through trial and error with audiences. It’s also challenged the model of setting a narrative arc with a start, a middle and an end. Most of these experiences need to be able to run on a loop, with a stream of people constantly joining but still being able to make sense of the experience. This has pushed thematic segments to the fore rather than chronological ones.
#5 they’re bringing about new collaborations and modes of creation
A whole raft of new technologies and skills are coming together to create new immersive experiences. A lot of this is evolving pretty rapidly but some of the stand outs including the detailed 3D mapping and modelling that Moment Factorydid to map the inside of the Dôme des Invalides. Not only did they need to visualise the interior of the spaces in great detail but they also needed to understand how light and sound would behave in such a bespoke setting. They used the modelling to adjust the projection and the soundtrack for the show. Another exciting example is the use of video game engines and decors in Virtual Reality experiences. Canadian gaming company Ubisoft has a whole department looking for non-gaming uses of their gaming products and recently collaborated with Excurio to create the backdrop of Eternelle Notre Dame from the graphic work already done for Assassin’s Creed.
Where the picture get murkier….
#6 not all immersive experiences are born equal under the sun…
As mentioned in the introduction, the word ‘immersive’ actually designates a range of experiences across a range of media. And not all are of the same quality or impact. Some of the earliest experiences that came onto our radar were shows that included imagery belonging to artists that had been dead for 150 years and therefore copyright free. Van Gogh, Monet and Klimt all form part of this family of shows that projected these artists’ oeuvre in no discernible sequence or theme. While we may be critical of this approach, the truth is that these shows has been hugely successful (such as the Ateliers des Lumières run by Culturespaces). Then there is the eminently instagrammable Team Labs hailing from Tokyo which many people also love but that we found pretty superficial and lacking in storytelling. And then there are the experiences that use technology that doesn’t serve them. An example of this is the current exhibition called Un Soir Avec Les Impressionistes at the Musée d’Orsay which uses VR to introduce you to five major impressionist artists as they stage their first group show but their faces are stilted, their works are difficult to see well and there isn’t much time or space to cover in the story, which really doesn’t fully leverage the medium.
#7 they require pretty large and bespoke spaces with large volumes that are hard to find in busy cities
You can’t just put an immersive anywhere. As we know from hosting the Vivid lightshow every year, making something a canvas for a projection takes careful planning and a lot of infrastructure. The more immersives take on as a staple of our cities’ cultural life, the stronger the case becomes for ‘immersives infrastructure’ which are usually highly kitted out large volume and column free spaces (up to 11m ceiling height!). So it’s far from being a solution to activating just any empty space but can do well in ‘lumpy’ spaces that are designed to spec but are empty before or after events.
There is so much more to say about this emerging field but we will continue to study the landscape and get to know the intricacies of the business model into the future. If you think immersives could be on the horizon for you, we’d love to chat more.
