Immersive Worlds 2016

I entered Baruch’s Immersive Worlds with no idea what I was going to experience.

I left three with questions: -Who are you/Who am I? -Are immersive experiences the future of all advertising/marketing? -Are we living in the Matrix? One thing was certain, Immersive Worlds lived up to it’s name. On the journey to the lecture hall down some coiling staircases there were a few worlds open to explore. The virtual reality worlds included a tour of the human brain, a cardboard world, and an augmented reality art exhibition.

Prior to the panel I had a solid notion of myself. I did not question my reality, accepting the world around me even though I had explored the human brain and walked around in a cardboard landscape. A facilitator handed me a Google Cardboard headset and before me there were skyscrapers made of hand ripped boxes, toilet roll centers and Paper towel towers. Looking up, down and around the lay of the land was all cardboard. The panel consisted of three distinguished advertising/media professionals: Beat Baudenbacher the CCO of LoyalKaspar, Aina Abiodun the Head of Strategy of Sideways, and Professor Carroll of Parson’s School of Design. If I were to summarize each speaker in a 140 characters or less it would like this: “Who are you?” “Disruptive Beauty” “People don’t trust advertisers.” 

Let’s take a step back though. What is “immersion” and how can we define an “immersive world?” Before virtual reality and augmented reality the traditional definition for an immersive world was an experience like going to a film. One thing has not changed about immersion, the experience is made whole by the narrative. Immersion can be defined by an experience in which the user and the environment engage in some type of exchange, almost mimicking a conversation. Aina Abiodun started a storytelling hackathon which takes the model of a hackathon and elevates it. A hackathon is usually a 24-36 hour event in which coders build something, but whatever they build is not built for consumers, it’s built for other coders. How could you make that more accessible to the consumer? According to Abiodun you incorporate storytelling, which is exactly what she did with Story Code. She presented a whole slew of immersive experiences that ranged from video games, a web journal for insomniacs, etc. After presenting this alluring projects she raised some questions which left me questioning myself as well.

“Is Virtual Reality a Bias Machine?” This and other questions of consciousness and identity seem innocent at first. But what happens to your actual self psychologically after prolonged session in virtual reality? Baudenbacher spoke from advertising perspective; he presented his philosophy on importance of immersive experiences and examples of immersion LoyalKaspar has developed. He and his team spent five years developing a more immersive experience for bed-time reading. The project developed into an app called Anna & Argyle. What I enjoyed the most about his talk was his outlook on the objective of advertising/marketing communications is:

He envisions the consumer landscape as a series of pools in which consumers dip into various brands content. The objective being to interrupt someones attention with something that interests them and bring them over to that pool. Professor Caroll spoke about how advances in technology have drive fraud in Advertising and has left consumers annoyed and not trusting of advertisers. He ended his apocalyptic talk with this wisdom.

The other panel consisted of a few figures from the Arts industry. The most interesting speaker from the panel was this young artist, Ezgi Uzcar. She specializes in making multi-sensory art.

Art is consumed using one or two senses, usually sight and sound. How can we incorporate the other senses into art? Ezgi created and designed a number of works like a braille piano, sound paintings, a sound necklace, and a dress that sounds and looks like her interpretation of a lunar eclipse.