Immersive game at the Riverside Museum, Glasgow
With roughly seventeen million visitors annually to culture and heritage sites in Glasgow and Edinburgh alone, tourism is a major driver of the Scottish economy – it is worth some £6bn annually, around five per cent of Scottish GDP; and supports 196,000 jobs. The centrality of cutting-edge immersive experiences for tourism, the heritage industry and audience development has been increasingly evident in recent years, with the development of Ars Electronica Linz (1996); the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum (2009); The Battle of Bannockburn (2013), and other venues.
Immersive experiences describe all forms of perceptual and interactive use of technologies and physical spaces in order to create a hybrid reality, in which visitors feel ‘part of the experience as a whole, encompassing all spheres of attention’ – immersion can be sensory (audio-visual, olfactory, haptic elements), challenge-based (interaction) and/or imaginative (narrative and interpretation).