What is “Immersive Media”?

A new frontier for social media and video gaming.

Immersive media is the future of media, characterized as interactive, social video game-like content delivered through virtual worlds. Immersive media is what happens when social media and video games converge, creating alternative realities that allow people to build virtual lives in online environments. 

 Immersive media encompasses social video games, virtual worlds, VR & AR, and haptic devices. It also includes the concept widely referred to as “the metaverse,” a vision of interconnected virtual worlds where individuals can create and participate in various activities and build a virtual life that is as rich and nuanced as their real world identity, or perhaps even moreso. 

 The convergence of video games and narrative media (TV & Movies) has come conspicuously into view through the popular HBO series The Last of Us. Whereas past video game adaptations like Sonic or The Angry Birds Movie presented a narrative and graphic style as cartoonish as their source material, The Last of Us shows that peeling back the layers of a video game can uncover plotlines and elements remarkably human. Immersive media, similarly, gives a name to the elements of video games beyond their high scores and boss fights–whether that’s socializing, working, or the endless other experiences finding their online counterparts for the first time ever. 

Simply put: traditional social media is losing the competition for users’ time. Platforms like Instagram engage users for an average of 30 minutes throughout the day, while the average Roblox player logs on for over 2.5 hours (source). Young users are not content with scrolling endlessly through social media feeds. 

Instead, they’ve been increasingly replacing it with gaming on platforms like Roblox. With 40 million games and new ones released each day, Roblox is as lively as any social media feed (source). 

You can read more Immersive Media in Everyrealm’s report here.