About the division
This year’s NordMedia Conference theme is Technological Takeover? Social and Cultural implications – promises and pitfalls. Immersive Media bring together reality and technology, increasing sense of presence through creating worlds that simulate reality. The last decade, sensory immersive media such as Virtual Reality, Cinematic VR, VR360 video, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality have been increasingly applied and introduced widely in sectors such as news journalism, retail, the healthcare sector, simulation industry, real estate, the gaming industry, documentary filmmaking, entertainment media industry, automotive industry, tourism, travel and humanitarian communication. Immersive media are also increasingly being used as co-creative visual methods for research.
This TWG critically reflects on the hypes surrounding immersive media and aims to bring together scholars of a wide interdisciplinary breadth, working on the many different sensorial, sociological, psychological and technological aspects of reality media. What are the promises and pitfalls of AR/VR/XR media? Research on immersive media entails a variety of subjects such as empathy studies, embodiment and perspective taking, gaming, immersive journalism, presence and pedagogical applications of immersive media. Other emerging fields of study are studies on affordances of ambi-sonic and spatial audio, the application of olfaction to add realism to immersive and sensory media, education.