The whole world fitted into one headset: friends, family, shopping, news, education, entertainment, love and sex. Immersive technologies like virtual, augmented and mixed reality are cultural precursors for a dramatic change in society, culture and economics. Forecasts assume that these technologies will be similarly as influential as the invention of television or the Internet. And yet immersive experience is not completely new. The cultural phenomenon of immersion (lat. plunge, submerge) is an essential phenomenon of postmodern society – from the staging of the ‘I’ on social networks, second life experience (World of Warcraft), binge watching (Netflix, Amazon), Pokémon Go and other augmented reality scenarios, VR-technologies up to the filter bubble of social networks. All these phenomena are in direct connection to immersive environments and the mediatised ‘make-believe’ of belonging, participation and escapism. The construction of mediatised counterworlds and –realities reaches its technological climax in the rediscovered fascination of VR. This lecture deals with the collective desire for immersive and mediatised experiences. The focus will be on the phenomenon of immersion in the course of time and the desire to discover realities outside of reality.

Dr. Christian Stiegler is head of the Immersive Hub Research Centre at the college of Business, Arts and Social Sciences at Brunel University London and co-founder of Indigo Reality Inc. for immersive experience in virtual, augmented and mixed reality. He is an internationally renowned expert for immersive media and VR storytelling, and an advisor to leading media corporations, such as BBC, Arte and Time Warner, for immersive productions. His upcoming book will be titled "The 360° Gaze: Immersions in Media, Society and Culture" (MIT Press, 2019).