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Production notes, announcements and thinking on interactive immersive storytelling from the Phoenix Immersive team.
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Immersive experiences are increasingly appearing in venues that did not create the original show themselves. Instead, an operator licenses an existing production, brings it into a local market and runs it for an agreed period.
30 October 20266 min read
An immersive experience can live in one building for years or move from city to city. Those two models may look similar to an audience buying a ticket, but they create very different questions for the people producing and operating the show.
A recognisable name is not enough to make a good immersive experience. The strongest cultural IP may already contain extraordinary art, stories, characters or ideas. Turning that material into a physical attraction still requires a new creative question...
An immersive venue does not have to be built around one show forever. As the sector develops, operators have more ways to think about programming: a single long residency, multiple titles across a weekly schedule, or a sequence of different shows running through the same technical installation.
“Immersive” and “interactive” are often used as if they mean the same thing. They do not. An experience can be immersive without giving the audience any control. It can also be interactive without creating a convincing sense of immersion.
A good immersive experience venue is not simply a large empty room. It is a building whose usable geometry, light, sound, power, access and visitor flow can support the creative experience and the live operation around it.
An immersive experience is one that makes the audience feel present inside the experience rather than simply positioned in front of it. That sense of presence can come from story, space, sound, interaction, scale or technology, but no single ingredient creates immersion on its own.
An established intellectual property starts with something a new attraction has to build from zero: recognition, meaning and an existing relationship with an audience. That can make IP a powerful foundation for immersive entertainment.
Location-based entertainment, usually shortened to LBE, is entertainment designed to be experienced in a physical place.
Immersive experience licensing can give an operator a faster route into location-based entertainment than building a show from the ground up. The concept, content and technical approach already exist; the job is to establish whether the show can work in a particular market, venue and operating model.