Notes from someone who has spent thirty years in the creative industry and far too long inside the fog machine.
It described an experience that allowed you to step into a story rather than simply observe it. The environment acknowledged your presence, the narrative unfolded around you rather than in front of you. And when it worked, the result stayed with you for a while, the way some concerts, theatre productions, or exhibitions take over a slot in someone’s memory and stay there.
Immersive was a special word, almost magical.
Somewhere along the way the word began drifting.
Today “immersive” (imagine my air quotation with a smirk on my face here) is almost everywhere: in pitch decks, hotel brochures, automotive launches, tech demos, retail installations, and conference panels about the future of experience design. The term has become so fluid that it now comfortably describes things as different as projection tunnels, LED billboards, VR product previews, themed hotel packages, and luxury car dashboards.
At one point I saw a press release describing a vehicle interior as an “immersive mobility environment.” Which, if we’re honest, sounded suspiciously like, yes, a car.
The strange thing is that none of this happened maliciously.
Immersive experiences genuinely became powerful. Once audiences started responding to environments that were multisensory, and emotionally engaging, the industry quite naturally tried to replicate that magic everywhere.
A few years ago Disney opened what might have been the most ambitious immersive hotel ever attempted.
The Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser experience at Walt Disney World was designed as a two night narrative adventure where guests lived inside a Star Wars story. There were actors, missions, branching storylines, hidden clues, and a spaceship interior where even the windows showed space.
From a design perspective it was extraordinary: every corridor, every interaction, every meal was part of the narrative.
It was also marketed explicitly as an immersive hotel experience but something interesting happened once real guests started arriving.
Many people loved the theatrical ambition but others felt trapped by it. The schedule was tightly scripted, the roleplay required participation, and the cost ( often more than $4,000 for two nights) made the expectations enormous.
Within less than two years the hotel closed.
And to be clear, it was not because the technology failed or the storytelling lacked creativity. If anything, the opposite was true. The experience had been designed with so much immersion in mind that it sometimes forgot something simpler.
People staying in a hotel still want the freedom to behave like themselves; they want to rest, to wander, to opt out of the story if they feel like it.
In other words, the immersive concept had become the headline, but the human experience still followed older, quieter rules, and that tension revealed something important: immersion cannot be forced.
Once you start paying attention, the examples become difficult to ignore. At some point we started a game in the studio: spotting the most creative misuse of the word immersive.
Luxury hotels now promote immersive digital previews, allowing guests to explore rooms through VR or AI-generated environments before they even arrive. The experience, basically, begins before the experience.
Entertainment franchises occasionally transform resorts into temporary immersive hotel stays, where guests can experience a narrative environment based on a television show or film property.
Source: GQ Magazine - TWL IRL Hotel
Car manufacturers have begun marketing advanced dashboards and ambient lighting systems as immersive driving experiences. Ok, I guess the driver was previously sitting outside the vehicle, observing it from a distance.
Retail environments now offer “immersive” mirrors powered by AR, allowing customers to try on products digitally. Useful, certainly. Immersive is a more generous interpretation.
And immersive dining continues to expand, with projection-led environments transforming walls into oceans, forests, or outer space while the meal unfolds. The food, quietly, remains the main experience.
Workspaces, too, are now described as immersive environments, layered with screens, responsive lighting, and digital overlays. The office has joined the list, which raises the question of what the rest of us have been doing there all this time.
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Even AI generated environments are now described as immersive, before anyone has actually stepped inside them. At least, if nothing else, this proves that the word immersive now travels extremely well.
Part of the confusion comes from a very understandable mistake: we started confusing the instruments with the music.
This tech can create the conditions for immersion, but it can’t guarantee the experience itself. The difference becomes obvious the moment you observe how people behave. I have seen installations built with millions in technology that visitors walked through in under two minutes. I have also seen small rooms with nothing more than a voice recording and a carefully written story hold people in silence for ten.
This is where the conversation becomes more interesting, because some of the most successful immersive environments in the world are also the most technologically complex.
Consider teamLab’s digital museums.
These environments are visually overwhelming: infinite digital flowers, responsive light sculptures, rooms where visitors walk barefoot through shallow water while projections ripple across the walls and floor.
Source: Teamlabs
Yet if you spend time observing how people behave inside these spaces, the technology is not what holds their attention.
What holds their attention is the freedom to explore, the sense that their presence actually matters. Visitors move slowly, wander without a prescribed path, and discover rooms rather than being guided through them. The wow effect attracts them, but individual agency keeps them there.
Immersion is about attention.
The craft lies in understanding how people enter a moment, how they stay with it, and what allows that moment to become meaningful. Sometimes that requires technology, sometimes it requires restraint; often it requires both.
But it almost never comes from simply adding more layers.
There is a useful parallel here with how we have measured success in digital marketing for years. We convinced ourselves that impressions were a reliable proxy for impact. If something appeared on a screen for 2 or 3 seconds, it counted. The numbers looked reassuring, the dashboards filled up nicely.
But most of those impressions were never truly experienced. They were scrolled past, half seen, or ignored entirely. They measured visibility, not attention. And attention is the thing that actually creates value.
The same confusion exists in immersive design. We assume that increasing the surface area of an experience (more screens, more pixels, more interactivity) will naturally deepen engagement. That if something surrounds you, it must involve you.
But immersion does not come from exposure. It comes from focus.
Our instinct, understandably, is to scale up: bigger screens, brighter visuals, more sensors, more data. The assumption is that scale will deepen the experience.
But human memory does not scale that way, meaning does.
Somewhere along the way, the industry did something subtle but important. We stopped treating these technologies as tools and started treating them as definitions.
Immersion became something you could specify in a brief, justify in a budget, and point to in a room.
If it had projection, it was immersive. If it had XR, it was immersive. If it reacted to you, it was immersive.
The label stuck. And once it stuck, it shaped how experiences were designed.
Instead of asking whether something created presence, we started asking whether it looked immersive enough. The shift is easy to miss, but it changes everything, because the moment immersion becomes a checklist, it stops being a feeling.
Which brings us back to the definition that matters.
Immersion is not a technology category: it is a psychological state created by attention, agency, and meaning.
Attention means the experience earns a person’s focus rather than demanding it. Agency means the visitor feels that their presence changes something within the environment. Meaning means the moment resonates emotionally, whether through story, beauty, curiosity, or recognition.
Technology can support those conditions beautifully but it can’t replace them.
Despite everything I have just written, I still love this field.
Even after thirty years in the creative industry, and more than a decade watching the word immersive stretch to the point of comedy, I still believe something extraordinary happens when these experiences are done well.
Because when immersion truly occurs, people stop thinking about the interface.
They stop filming, they are in the moment.
And that quiet moment, when someone forgets the technology and becomes present inside the experience, remains one of the most powerful creative tools we have.
Which is why the question we should probably ask ourselves before designing anything new is surprisingly simple: if the power went out, would the experience still move someone?
If the answer is no, it may not be immersive. It may simply be technology performing enthusiasm.
