If you look at the world of AV today, one thing is clear.  People are going big.  Whether it’s direct view LED, a large video wall, new Sony LED modules, Prysm walls, Christie Microtiles, or good old fashioned large format projection, bigger is better if you want to get someone’s attention.

Look around the audio world and you’ll see a similar trend: immersion. Immersive audio has gone beyond surround sound as surround sound went beyond stereo two decades ago. Presence speakers and more rear channels have become the goal. Dolby Atmos is here to stay. Immersion however goes beyond “big.” “Big” in audio means loud, but immersion means employing a spatial relationship.  Putting the person in the middle of the experience.

So how do we take our visual experiences to an immersive level?  And why does that even work in the first place?

Let’s answer the why first.

Here’s an interesting fact from a guy who loved Zooloogy, animal behavior, and anatomy.

Engaging the peripheral vision increases retention of a message and makes the experience more memorable.

Why is this?  To start, being in an emotional state helps people remember. The emotion can be positive or negative, the effect is the same: Enhanced recall. Good speakers engage the heart, the gut or the groin to stimulate emotion while engaging the head to cement their ideas. This is why certain people can create calls to action every time, despite the message, product or goal. They know how to engage emotion.

In the same way, engaging a person’s peripheral vision creates an involuntary state of Fight or Flight in the brain. In the food chain, humans are predators by nature, yes, but we were not without predators ourselves.  Our peripheral vision safe guarded us from falling victim to everything from a surging tiger to an unexpected landslide.

When our peripheral vision is engaged we are in an excited emotional state and more of our brain is activated.  This creates the perfect storm for cementing a message we want someone to remember or get them involved in a cause or movement we feel is important.

So given that we’re wired this way, how do we create technology experiences that take advantage of the phenomena?

Immersion. Engage the peripheral. This could be through a large curved projection system that wraps the user in 180 degree field of video, this could be a large display in the 5-8 degree active focal zone with lights and other events being triggered at the edges of the viewing cone, or it could be a combination of lights, video, and mechanical interactions of physical objects all playing together to tell a story.

I remember an RFP I saw for a Pearl Harbor experience about seven years ago. The design hoped to leverage a large screen showing video of the calm Hawaii day, interrupted by air raid sirens as shadows of Japanese Zeroes spilled across the docks. Water would explode from the surrounding harbor as the sounds of bullets and torpedoes overtook the sirens, and the video went from a peaceful island paradise to an active battle with civilians running for cover.

Now I don’t know about you, but I would bet a fortune the people who experienced that AV event would remember the story and scale of what happened at Pearl Harbor better than the ones who watched the same video on a 70″ flat panel.

Immersion works. Why do you think people are so excited about VR and AR? However that is an individual experience. Immersion can also be employed in community experiences like the ones above or like Barco is doing with their Escape project.

The point is, as AV professionals we need to start leveraging our knowledge of people, emotion and memory in our designs if we want to create lasting impact for our clients. If not, our company will be the one that installed the 4 flat panels everyone saw but can’t remember a thing about.