• Immersive

    Immersive

Immersive

So what does immersive really mean?

 

Immersion, the state of consciousness where an immersant's awareness of physical self is diminished or lost by being surrounded in an engrossing total environment

The word has been applied to everything from handheld video games to ultra-high-res digital presentations projected on huge hemispherical domes with multi-channel audio. Virtual reality systems with head-mounted displays are considered immersive, as are so-called “caves,” research systems that surround one or two users with 3D images projected on the faces of an 8–10-foot cube.

Most writers on the subject agree that the essence of immersiveness is giving viewers the impression that they are actually in the place depicted by the presentation. This illusion depends on successfully fooling several senses, principally sight and hearing, and eliminating or reducing any cues that would tend to break the illusion.

The basic principle in creating a visually immersive experience is to fill the audience’s field of view. As everyone knows, the closer something is to you, the larger it appears to be, that is, the more of your field of view it fills. A larger object farther away can appear to be the same size as a smaller one that is closer.

So with an image projected on a screen, a smaller screen can be made to seem bigger simply by getting closer to it. As long as the image quality is high enough that the viewer doesn’t begin to see film grain, digital pixels, or other distracting artifacts, the experience is nearly, if not precisely, the same as seeing a larger screen from farther away. As we will see, almost all efforts to create immersive motion picture experiences have involved increasing the amount of information presented, with larger film frames, higher frame rates, or both.

By James Hyder Editor/Publisher, Large Format Examiner, IMERSA Media Partner
www.lfexaminer.com

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