Immersive experiences: new realities for heritage education
From the first cinema projection in 1895 and the first theme parks in the 1950s, immersive spaces and experiences have become a key factor for engaging audiences. Now, new technologies and devices have replaced the conceptions of space and time creating new realities and experiencing new immersive worlds. In this process, many cultural institutions have created engaging experiences as virtual or interactive exhibitions with virtual images, virtual reality, or augmented reality but also in their educational activities and platforms with augmented reality options in their educational resources or web experiences where the audience feel really connected with their materials. But what is an immersive experience and how is it produced?
Understanding the concept of immersivity
An immersion process can be understood as the way someone is absorbed by doing something. In an immersive experience, the communicative strategies and tools are more important than the technological assets (Taiuti 2005). Immersivity also depends on the individual process of meaning-making and how the surroundings create this effect (Lukas 2013).
According to Saler (2012), immersion in virtual worlds starts in the collective imagination when a story is adopted by many individuals and then it becomes more real. For example, everyone who reads a book imagines the story and the surroundings in a different way. In a phenomenological approach, we could say every feeling is different as the story is the same because everyone is placed in a different landscape but there are some elements that connect with reality transposing real situations to our mind, so it is difficult to make a difference between what it is real and what it is not.
The development of immersive experience and immersive spaces takes into account these concepts of individual perception, representation of reality, and relationship with the surroundings developing a multi-sensoriality space in transmedia storytelling (Freitag et alli 2020). It is based on some communication processes that engage more with the audience such as the creation of a soundscape (Roginska and Geluso 2018), a landscape of sounds, the use of motion image elements, or the inclusion of gamified elements among others (Scuri et alli 2016).
The first relationship between those elements for creating an immersive experience and space was the cinema or the motion pictures in 1895. After that, many other physical and digital experiences have been created as museum exhibitions, theme parks attractions (i.e. Scalera 2002), video games, and virtual reality, and augmented reality technologies for many domains as education and heritage education.
Developing immersive environments for digital heritage education
In the case of learning, most of the work has been done on the development of Virtual Reality (VR) or Augmented Reality (AR) environments as a way to engage more with students, but following the approach of this essay, we can learn from their theoretical frameworks to apply in a not mandatory VR environment, although it is possible to integrate it in the learning platforms.
According to Lan (2020), immersion, participation, interaction, and authenticity are basic components of any learning process and virtual reality processes have a lot of them. Also, VR can be used for having visual and different experiences than physical ones very related to authenticity as you can not make a difference between reality and not reality, for social networking linked to participation and interaction, and for handcrafting as you can interact and move things in a virtual world and experience in a multi-sensory way getting new skills and learning outcomes. Any of these uses of VR can be used in heritage education to discover new places and know more details.
In contrast to VR models understood in the way you need a headset to have an immersive experience as Lan (2020) proposed before, all uses for VR included the paper can be applied in an immersive website experience like a virtual exhibition (i.e. Digitorial Gods in Color from the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in Frankfurt) or a virtual learning platform (i.e. Met Kids from The Metropolitan Museum of New York). The combination of video, audio, gamified elements, and powerful digital storytelling can help to engage and to get the same immersion as VR. Also, it can be adapted to be useful from a touchable large screen in the classroom to a portable technological asset such as a laptop, a tablet, or a mobile phone on its own or interactive with another screen.
Bibliography
- Freitag, F., Molter C., Mücke, L.K., Rapp, H., Schlarb, D. B, Sommerlad E., Spahr C. et Zerhoch D (2020): Immersivity: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Spaces of Immersion , Ambiances. Available on “https://journals.openedition.org/ambiances/3233” [Reviewed 1 May 2021]
- Lan, Y. J. (2020). Immersion, interaction and experience-oriented learning: Bringing virtual reality into FL learning. Language Learning & Technology, 24(1), 1–15
- Lukas, S. A (2013). The immersive worlds handbook: designing theme parks and consumer spaces. Burlington, MA: Focal Press.
- Roginska, A., & Geluso, P. (eds.). (2018). Immersive Sound: The Art and Science of Binaural and Multi-channel Audio. London: Routledge.
- Saler, M (2012) As-If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Scalera, M (2002): You’re on stage at Disney World: an analysis of Main Street USA in the Magic Kingdom. Athens, GA: University of Georgia.
- Scuri, S., Chiodo, E., & Calabi, D. (2016): Translating place identity into transmedia communication systems: Communication design process and methods. In: ETSID (2016). Proceedings from the Systems & Design: Beyond Processes and Thinking Conference (IFDP — SD2016). Valencia: Universitat Politècnica de València.
- Taiuti, L. (2005). Multimedia: l’incrocio dei linguaggi comunicativi. Roma: Meltemi
