Brave New (Immersive) Worlds

Boomtown Festival, with its 65,000 attendees, is described as the largest interactive theatre in the world, featuring a cohesive storyline that has been evolving since 2009.

Apart from profitability and of course, the music, it’s creative aim is to facilitate an organic, collaborative, interactive and playable narrative that makes attendees feel part of the story and so, of the world of Boomtown.

This year, the festival involved 92 theatre crews with over 2,000 performers. And yet, a post event survey found 83% of attending 18-24-year-olds had indeed engaged with that story.

To achieve this success, Boomtown focussed on making the narrative as accessible as possible: their story does not have a single start point, instead provides myriad opportunities for attendees to pick up the thread in their own way.

Not just the wider site plan and set design, but designed billboards across the site, event wide PA, large scale ‘happenings’ – at this years ‘election’ themed event, both hustings and protests were, in quotes, ‘organised’, and an on-site newspaper, The Daily Rag, all helped to tell the story, creating a more immersive and cohesive experience, that enhanced both the festival's narrative and through that, it’s atmosphere.

At the other end of the spectrum, albeit perhaps to an entirely calmer, more thoughtful audience, (We live in an) Ocean of Air, is a VR headset driven experience created by Marshmallow Laser Feast able to take it’s attendees inside nature.

We can all imagine what it feels like to touch a leaf, but the creators here instead asked the question ‘what does a leaf feel like, when it’s being touched?’ We know what it feels like to breathe, but what does breath itself feel, as it moves through our body?

Technology allows us to witness phenomena beyond our natural senses. Before the Hubble telescope, the galaxy was ‘just’ the stars we could see, not the nebula we now know exist.

So it appears a technological approach, in Marshmallow’s case by using VR, can very much help audiences both explore ideas and expand perception: the cornerstones of any story worth telling.

But technology is only a tool.

The most meaningful and impactful immersive experiences are made when all five senses are employed. Sight, sound, smell, touch and taste. A sixth, proprioception (our sense of where we are in space) can further help, and reshaping that sense is of course, VR’s USP.

So if we’re in the business of telling worthwhile stories that change perception, thinking and action, we need to take risks, and go beyond the standard senses. We need to “go beyond the experience”.

Set in a Coventry of 1989, "In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats" is on one level the story of the illegal rave culture of that time. On another, it’s a multi-sensory experience blending set design, art direction, volumetric and motion capture, immersive video, real-time gaming, haptics, wind machines, interactivity and projection to create a truly immersive event, that transcends, and is about more than, “just the tech”.

As its producers, East City Films, say, ‘“When what you're offering is bold, complex and has stories that can connect with people, then it can change the way that people think about your event, your venue and your organisation.”

Would VR alone be enough then? What happens when you take the headset off? What’s the environment in which you put it on? If we dare to set a scene before we ‘run the show’, is the space for remembering that show diminished? Or is the impact of it greater? What if instead of demanding audiences listen to our story, we invite them to be a part of it, like they do at Boomtown?

Yes, there are challenges: free roaming VR requires floor space that we don’t always have. Training not on the tech, but on the storyline, requires time and a staff enthusiasm that can be in similarly short supply. And it is of course, often costly. Audiences are still perhaps a little wary of tech, too. Certainly, it’s not yet part of ‘normal life’.

But events aren’t ‘normal life’, either.

Disney have a saying: ‘Magic is honest’. What it means however is more instructive: Fiction isn’t just a story; it’s a playground.

If you can ground guests in their familiar, setting reasonable expectations – and then surprise them – then you don’t necessarily need time, money, space and technology. To create their worldwide empire, no matter how ‘big’ the storyline, they revert to a simple, single question:

“What are the different interactions that will create the memories?”

And then they build their playgrounds, inviting feedback at all stages as they create the seemingly impossible and make it real. Newsflash: you’re not really on the bridge of the Millenium Falcon.

But because they invest the time in training their teams that the story is as authentic as it can be; because they spend the money prototyping to ensure their special effects work, to order, on order, every time; because they too challenge themselves to make it as easy as possible for their audiences to be a part of the story, one of so many layers they’ve written in to the narrative, they are rightly famous for the experiences they deliver, to around 90 million people a year worldwide.

Of course, we don’t all have Disney’s dollars, and building an event can often feel more like building an elephant.

But like the elephants that are Boomtown, that are in Coventry, ‘in pursuit of beats’, and in the sequoia tree forests of Oceans of Air, they’re all a collection of parts.

There’s an old video game called Katamari Dacancy. There’s an even older game called Buckaroo. The objective of both, and the excitement – the ‘experience’ - in both, is to collect as many connected items as you can, either for a plastic bucking bronco or a digital prince, on a mission to ‘rebuild the stars’.

The more we dare to provide for that collection in our events, and in the telling of our stories, whether though design, digital or delivery, the more we can dare to deliver the improbable, to ‘rebuild stars’. The more immersive, the more layered, our stories are, the more engaged our audiences will feel in them.

But storytelling isn’t a series of acts. It’s an art, built on as full a narrative arc as possible. It isn’t about pretence, or being ‘made to believe’, through mere touchpoint, trickery or technology.

Great storytelling, the foundation of great experiences, is where those collected acts are connected by creativity. And the more courageous that creativity, the more immersed our audiences can be in their realities, virtual or otherwise.

(Above images ? event/experience owners, or AI generated)

?