What is IX?

An immersive experience plays with your senses,creating the sensation of an alternate, semi-digital reality that feels real—and opens up entirely new worlds.

You experience this reality as an observer or, for example, as a co-creator within the story (such as participating in a virtual play or testing a virtual product). In these cases, your senses are engaged using devices like VR or AR headsets. A VR headset is the high-end device for experiencing IX, and due to the intense sensory experience, it’s often difficult to continue for longer than half an hour.

The term Immersive Experiences (IX) is an umbrella term that includes Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), as well as Mixed Reality (MR) and Extended Reality (XR). Most immersive experiences are now experienced on a monitor, tablet, or mobile device. In addition to visual elements, sound now plays an important role in IX. Touch (pressure/temperature on your skin, muscle tension) is still in its early stages and is not yet widely used but adds to a more ‘lifelike’ experience; for example, you can feel realistic resistance when squeezing a virtual tennis ball, for example.

IX offers exciting economic opportunities for the Dutch creative industry, which ranks among the global top 10. The global market for immersive productions is growing annually by 25-35%, and it’s expected to reach 100 to 150 billion euros by 2030.

Opportunities for the creative industry lie in producing high-quality IX content and in directly offering IX to consumers. This includes attending cultural events or exploring cultural heritage from your living room, large-scale on-site IX installations, and immersive media shows where you actively participate and are transported to other worlds.

In addition to entertainment, IX is expected to have a significant societal impact. It promises to enhance understanding, empathy, and enjoyment while strengthening participation and collaboration across various sectors of society. For instance, IX can help promote inclusivity and encourage sustainable behavior by allowing people to step into each other’s world or another reality, as well as training firefighters and medical personnel, or treating phobias.

There are also economic opportunities in many sectors in the Netherlands related to IX: improving productivity, reducing costs, and addressing labor market shortages. With IX, learning or working becomes faster.

IX has become popular in gaming and entertainment but can also be applied to societal issues in areas such as:

• Faster innovation and learning
• Better mental and physical health
• Accelerating sustainability across various sectors
• Influencing behavior, such as participation and inclusion
• More efficient use of scarce educational resources
• Better design through virtualization
• Lower energy consumption

McKinsey identifies four essential components of safe immersive experiences:

• Content and Experience: Everything you see, hear, and experience in an immersive environment, such as avatars, 360° videos, virtual objects, storylines, and games
• Platforms: The digital environments in which IX take place, such as Meta Horizons, Roblox, YouTube, Netflix, and SteamVR
• Hardware & Infrastructure: The technology that enables IX, such as VR headsets, 360° cameras, 5G, haptic feedback (for tangible interactions), holograms, and powerful graphics processors (GPUs)
• Fundamental Technologies: The foundation on which IX is built, such as blockchain (for ownership and transactions), identity management (for user recognition), payments, render farms (for fast graphical processing), and cybersecurity

Together, these four components enable an interactive, immersive, and secure IX experience.