According to Panasonic Connect’s national live events manager, Jared Darensbourg, immersive entertainment “leverages innovative audiovisual technology to engage and captivate audiences by transporting them to a world outside their own.” AV technology, such as projectors and spatial audio, are key to making themed entertainment as engaging and immersive for participants as possible. In addition to other AV solutions, Darensbourg also emphasizes the importance of displays and digital signage solutions to support wayfinding for guests. “Innovative, tech-driven experiences like these can’t rely on paper signs to guide guests through ticketing and concession lines,” asserted Darensbourg.

Hilary McVicker, vice president of sales and marketing at The Elumenati, says immersive entertainment is analogous to group virtual reality. Rather than putting on headsets and experiencing entertainment individually, immersive entertainment allows participants to experience the entertainment together, cultivating a more social and collaborative environment. McVicker says this speaks to the goal of the themed entertainment industry: “You want people to leave their house and come to a venue, and a big factor in that is creating an experience that people can share.”

Bradford Benn, chief advisist at Advistist Group, agrees with McVicker’s assertion that the goal of the themed entertainment industry is to encourage people to attend a venue. Benn has experience with designing immersive, 4D theme park movie theaters, and says the challenge is to create an experience that incentivizes people to pay more money to attend the theme park movie theater, rather than streaming from home or going to a standard theater. In order to do so, the experience at the theme park has to be more immersive by means of better technology (the superior synchronization of visual, physical, and audio effects) and better storytelling.

Examples of AV Tech in Themed Entertainment

Panasonic Connect and Lighthouse Immersive worked together to create the popular Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit in Toronto. The exhibit utilizes 53 Panasonic PTRZ770 projectors running in tandem to create images that are 26ft. high and up to 170ft. wide. In order to cultivate an immersive experience, the PTRZ770 projectors make use of side-shifting and edge-blending to seamlessly blend separate images.

The Migrations immersive exhibit is a collaboration with The Elumenati and the San Diego Zoo. The exhibit utilizes The Elumenati’s dual OmniFocus 30350 projection system on a 7m dome, displaying insects and other creatures flying over visitors’ heads to evoke a “bug’s-eye” view. The exhibit also features spatial audio and flower and grass scents in conjunction with the display to further immerse visitors.

Similarly, OpenEye Global worked with Sea Life Aquarium to launch Doodle Reef, an entertaining and educational experience that uses a mix of interactive tablets and large touch displays to allow visitors to design virtual fish. Once visitors have created their fish, they have the opportunity to interact with it as it swims through the reef on a larger display. Visitors can also bring their fish design home via a companion app. OpenEye Global CEO Bryan Meszaros says the use of tables and touch displays is intentional, as it allows “children to explore and interact with each other, instead of trying to inject elements of ‘innovation’ that overpower the fun tactile experiences they have in interacting with the fish.”

OpenEye Global also worked with Madame Tussauds Berlin to create a lobby with a visual sequence that would “welcome visitors to the attraction and provide a glimpse into the experiences that await.” The experience features a 1mm pitch LED display that curves around the lobby’s center focal wall as visitors enter. A variety of visual effects are used to bring the figures to life. The figures even occasionally “appear to be breaking the visible plane of the display” from the viewing angle. The experience also makes use of a custom soundtrack and unique lighting sequence. This installation was also a finalist in LAVNCH [CODE]’s 2023 Out of This World Experiences Awards.

Meow Wolf’s Convergence Station employs “layered storytelling and fully interactive exhibits” to transport visitors to a city of four alien worlds joined together by a rare cosmic event. The experience uses technology to aid in mapping speaker locations to create optimum speaker coverage. Sufficient and varied (speakers placed at high-, low-, and mid-points) speaker coverage allow for a more immersive and believable audio experience for visitors.

Using AV Tech in New Ways for Themed/Immersive Entertainment

Aside from elevating experiences to make them more fun and engaging, McVicker says AV technology also makes educational experiences, such as going to a museum, more meaningful: “It’s not just a dump of information, it’s giving you an emotional connection to the content as well.”

Micheal Bridwell, VP of commercial sales at Sonance, points to hospitals outfitting rooms with loudspeakers at high, mid and low placements that project “healing tones at a lower volume to elicit feelings of rest and relaxation” as a new and indirect form AV technology being used for immersive purposes. Bridwell says select hospitals in the United States are also using this technique to help healthcare professionals “prepare for and recover from intense medical procedures.”

According to Benn, another new and important consideration for AV technology in regards to themed and immersive entertainment is experience equity; many current immersive and themed entertainment technologies exclude people with disabilities. Examples of this would be people who wear glasses not being able to enjoy 3D experiences, as well as people with colorblindness not being able to properly view displays. Moving forward, technologies for themed and immersive entertainment need to be developed with accessibility in mind.

The Future of Themed Entertainment

The future of themed entertainment likely lies in using increasingly sophisticated technology to personalize the experience for individual guests. Meszaros predicts generative AI experiences will become the norm: “Experiences will evolve over time and feed off guest data and truly become unique for them each time,” he said. He also posits that the metaverse will begin to play a role in “forging unique relationships with guests,” pointing to Universal Studios’ incorporation of metaverse technology into the Mario Kart experience.

Bridwell agrees, saying that the content creators he works with are “intent on finding ways through AV to create individual experiences, even within a crowded location.” Creative content randomization based on location within an experience and adaptable audio and video content that adjusts “based on the occupancy of the space” are a few examples he gave of immersive experiences aiming to become more individualized for attendees.