ARST 4915/6915 Thematic Inquiry: The Immersion Lab: Live, Embodied & Playable Experiences

“It’s so immersive.” Everyone says it; everyone means something different. What do we actually mean?

This studio makes immersion concrete by treating real-time, liveness, and presence as our raw materials. We range from being “immersed” in environments (forests, water, built sites) to being absorbed inside a story, game, or performance. Through movement labs and light fieldwork, we explore spatial storytelling and playable media such as XR (extended reality), LARP, 360 video, binaural audio, and location-based work. This project-based course applies practical methods for worldbuilding and experience design (including the magic circle), moving through prototyping and playtesting toward a collaborative final project, and a brief survey of immersive art’s lineage from ritual and cave paintings to “happenings” and XR.