ABSTRACT
A deeper experience of immersion in media has always been the major point of difference between VR and other media. This chapter investigates how VR professionals create immersion. Twenty interviews with VR designers, programmers and commercial managers were conducted between August and December 2017 to assess how immersion is understood by people making VR in the consumer field. Following a macro-analysis of the data, a thematic analysis of the material (Joffe and Thompson, 2011: 211–215) identified five repeated immersive elements that reoccurred across interviews: sight, vision and visual design; sound and audio; touch and haptics; story and narrative; and mood or attunement of the user. The blending of these elements into an immersive experience is contingent upon what kind of experience is being planned, and so the immersive elements can be thought of as part of an immersion assemblage where different elements play critical parts in immersion depending on the experience, and redundancy means that not all elements are needed for immersion to occur.
