Aesthetics of Immersion in Interactive Immersive Environments

This book examines the aesthetics of immersive experience in Light Strings, an interactive immersive environment. One of prominent aspects of Interactive Art is the notion of immersion. The concept of immersion is generally defined as a viewer forgetting the real world outside of the virtual environment and by a sense of being in a make-believe world generated by computational hardware and software. Immersion has been explored in various disciplines such as literature, game, architecture, aesthetics, but many Virtual Reality scientists and artists have actively examined the concept by focusing on creating new immersive environments that push the boundaries of new technology. This approach is often aimed at countering the disembodying tendency of virtual reality concerns. As an interactive artist and researcher, I conceive of immersion as any experience where integrated bodily, conscious, and pre-conscious states thoroughly intertwine with the world. Moreover immersion is where mind, body and environment interweave and communicate with each other inside of technically-mediated, spatially enclosed, and sensuously-interactive computational environments.