Introduction to the Immersive Impact Review
- Michael Epstein
- Mar 12
- 6 min read
Updated: 18 hours ago
How Presentation fads and Inconvenient Truths Inspired the Review
Soso Limited’s “Reconstitution” scrubbed and remixed the transcript from the 2008 Presidential debates as a live VJ performance. Soso limited archives, 2026.
As a graduate student in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program in the early 2000’s I was constantly combing Boston for unusual media experiences. It was a time when immersive theater was starting to emerge in Boston. Punchdrunk took over an abandoned middle school in 2008 and ran an early version of “Sleep No More” with eels writhing in bathtubs and a Bates Motel set that sent me down a 30-minute rabbit hole. But maybe the biggest immersive revolution going on in Boston was in slide presentations. On any given weeknight you could catch a Pecha Kucha about urban planning, go to a bar for a rowdy NerdNite about the neurobiology of zombies or see VJ’s re-mixing the presidential debates with a deck that looked positively hallucinogenic. Doing funky PowerPoints was a thing. Kind of like projection mapping is all the rage today. Presentation technology was leaving Clippy’s 1990’s dorkiness behind, and entering a cleaner Keynote zone, even becoming kaleidoscopic a la Prezi.
“Climate change leader,” Encyclopædia Britannica, 2006. Here Gore stands next to the composite image of an Earth with no cloud cover. Clear as day.
But this fetish for a good presentation possibly reached its apotheosis in 2007 when a documentary about a presentation blew up. “An Inconvenient Truth” featured the restrained intensity of defeated presidential candidate Al Gore showing us slides of Earth and graphs of temperature rise and ended with an Melissa-Etheridge-scored list of action items: “plant trees,” “ride a bicycle,” and “recycle.” The only live action in the film is Al stumping around a stage to point out details in his presentation and, his coup de grace, rising 20 feet in a cherry picker to reach the upper echelons of a carbon concentration graph. The audience is seated in the film, we are seated in a movie theater watching. And, somehow, this film pops into my mind when I think about the roots of immersive experiences for impact. It’s a great example of a media experience that combines scientific data and radical shifts in perspective. While it doesn’t invite audiences into a virtual or theatrical space to walk around, it does invite audiences to see themselves from a much wider angle.
Left: “Earthrise,” taken on December 24, 1968, by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders.
Right: “Pale Blue Dot”photograph of the Earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on February 14, 1990. These images bookend Al Gore’s climate presentation in the film, adding perspective on the stakes of the film and the scale of the problem.
For example, Gore begins his presentation with the first outer space photo of Earth shot from the moon in 1968. It’s called “Earthrise” and it features a half-lit, swirling blue-white marble seen over the horizon of the moon. It’s stunning. At this point in the film, Gore invites us to save the planet, mostly because it is so beautiful. Gore notes that 18 months after that marble shot was widely circulated, the environmental movement took off in the United States. The film then gets into its main act, presenting an arresting series of images and graphs that show the growth of greenhouse effects and their consequences in our world. And then we zoom out again. 4 billion miles out, to an image called “Pale Blue Dot.” Gore notes that this dot is “our only home.” It’s precious, irreplaceable, drifting in an immense, endless darkness. And then Gore appeals to our pride, to our duty to this tiny dot. And, finally, credits roll with those small acts of environmentalism we can all do to reduce CO2 levels.
The film went on to win a couple of Oscars, led to Gore getting a Nobel Prize, and informed my next car purchase: a Prius. But from an immersive perspective, it’s also a telling case study. In taking us from melting icebergs, to flowing streams, to these exponentially wider views of the Earth, Gore and director Davis Guggenheim are playing with scale and audience positioning as we’ve seen in masterful immersive productions. In addition, the film is 3D in a way that most immersive producers would envy. Currently, a team of 3,500 trained presenters are showing the film in living rooms, lecture halls, and theaters and leading discussions afterwards. This use of real space to build community, deepen understanding, and take action is 100% aligned with how I see immersive for impact. So I guess this film came to mind because it is a great lesson in immersive, even though some may call it a “Flatty.” It’s doing a lot with space, audience perspective, and follow-on action that can inform this next age of media production.
The Immersive Impact Review is designed to help immersive creators learn from the past, from each other, and from rigorous study of impact. We hope to introduce readers to the most influential academic studies out there, while becoming a source of engagement for non-academics, producers, fans, and socially-engaged readers. Our methods to take you there are mostly journalistic.
We are on the lookout for great stories that can be told with a high dose of research, interviews, and objectivity. We’re looking for unforgettable characters and original voices to both tell and be featured in these stories. And we hope these stories will elevate and connect the field. Maybe they will help a course you’re taking (or teaching) dig into what social impact means. Or an article will foster a sharper critical eye in the studios and labs where this work is being made. We will have some reviews, but try our best to avoid boosterism and add historical and cultural framing to our assessments. Finally, we’ll do our utmost to temper the hype. We believe that even well-intentioned hype–the rosy predictions of growth, the cherry picking of positive feedback, and the mix of self-promotion with audience studies–can ultimately defeat meaningful impact.
In this inaugural edition we strive to expand your perspective on what immersive for impact can be along a few vectors. First we look at who’s really able to get their hands on this stuff. It’s the number one issue we saw in the first batch of article proposals. While there are many aspects to the problem of immersive’s reach (audience size, price-prohibitive devices, exclusive festivals, etc,) we look at how “Cultural XR” is finding its way from curated festival floors to widely available formats and venues. Then we look at XR for impact in an entirely different way: as a tool for small farmers to get a leg up in the world of microfinance. Next we look at XR in European newsrooms, exploring ethical and production standards that are being developed on the fly. Finally, we look at the role of XR in taking cultural institutions out of their established frameworks and into more inclusive, civic spaces. All of the articles involve movement, pushing organizations into new spaces, new audiences, aided by the pick axe of immersive media. Audiences aren’t just being moved, structures are being shifted.
We hope you receive this debut issue as an invitation to join us in this exploration. Interested in writing something? Head to the Submit page. Want to meet up with us? Check out the Events page. Do you have some corrections, some inside info? If so, please contact the editors. And if you want to support us, join our publishing organization, The Immersive Experience Alliance. And thanks for reading this far and reliving some old Al Gore moments with me. I hope we can channel some of his measured positivism and penchant for action in these upcoming issues.
Michael Epstein
A graduate of M.I.T.’s Comparative Media Studies program, Michael Epstein is the Managing Editor of IXA’s Immersive Impact Review. He is also the founding principal of Walking Cinema, an innovative production studio based in San Francisco that specializes in site-specific, non-fiction immersive experiences.
Michael is an active educator and scholar of new media. He spent a decade as an Senior Lecturer at The California College of the Arts where he focused on immersive story design. He is also the founder of the Experiential Journalism Lab in Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. The Lab focuses on teaching a cohort of journalism students how to create experiential stories tied to rigorous reporting. Over his career, Michael has developed immersive work for PBS, Audible, Adobe, MTV, MIT, the Smithsonian, the National Endowment for the Humanities and NPR.
Affiliation: Managing Editor, Immersive Impact Review
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