This list is not exhaustive and may be added to or changed as new innovations and updates arrive.

360-degree video

What is it?

360-degree video is a form of filmmaking where the action is filmed in all directions around a special camera or array of cameras.

How does it work?

360 video playback can be on a flat screen, with someone clicking and dragging to change their view of the scene, on a phone that you move around to see different parts of the film, or in a Virtual Reality (VR) headset. You can also exhibit 360-degree films in exhibition spaces using multiple projectors shining on different walls, or a domed projection screen ceiling, like a planetarium.

Audience Experience

Audiences can choose where to look in 360 degrees when watching the film. 360-degree video is a linear form of immersive content, much like a traditional film, and would usually be experienced while stationary.

Alternate Reality Game (ARG)

What is it?

Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are interactive stories that unfold in the real world, using both digital and physical media. Players influence the story by solving puzzles, following clues, and exploring real and online spaces.

How does it work?

ARGs are delivered in real-time by live creatives who deliver the story, puzzles, and multimedia content to the players, who have the agency to influence the experience as it progresses. 

ARGs often tell their stories across different platforms—websites, social media, videos, and even physical objects.

Audience Experience

Audiences can either experience this individually or as a community of players working together to delve deeper into the story.

Extended Reality (XR)

Extended Reality (XR) is an umbrella term used to describe all Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR) experiences, as well as any other technology that adds digital elements to the reality of an audience member.

Augmented Reality (AR)

What is it?

A form of immersive media where digital content is overlaid onto the real world.

How does it work?

Phone-based AR uses the camera on a phone to look at the world, adding digital content on top and displaying that on the phone screen. AR headsets do a similar thing, with external cameras recording the real world and the digitally augmented view being shown on the headset's internal screen, much like with VR. AR content can also be projected onto a space to augment it, without the need for the audience to use an individual device, or non-visual content can be used to augment the audience’s surroundings, such as with immersive and spatial audio experiences. 

Audience Experience

AR can be experienced in a variety of ways, including while moving or stationary, with various devices or stagings. AR is a broader term than VR or 360-degree video and new forms of AR experiences may be created that don’t align with this definition but, at their core, they will sit in between the real world and the senses of the audience and add digital content into the mix so the perception of the real world is changed before it reaches the audience. AR experiences are not traditionally interactive, with interactive AR experiences being more appropriately labelled as Mixed Reality.

Mixed Reality (MR)

What is it?

Where AR provides a view of the real world with added digital elements, and VR provides a fully digital replacement of the real world, Mixed Reality (MR) experiences sit somewhere in between. A Mixed Reality experience combines the real world with digital content, but in a responsive way where the real and digital elements can interact with each other as if they existed in the same space. 

How does it work?

This can be displayed in any of the same ways as AR content and will often involve some level of interaction between the real and digital elements.

Audience Experience

Mixed-Reality can be experienced in a variety of ways, including while moving or stationary, with various devices or stagings.

Virtual Reality (VR) 

What is it?

VR is a form of immersive media in which a computer-generated environment is created in 360 degrees around an audience member. 

How does it work?

A VR headset is a screen, placed close to the face to fill the field of view, and a set of sensors that monitor the movements of the head of the audience and replicate those in the digital experience to trick the brain into believing that what it is seeing is real. 

VR headsets can be inexpensive headsets that you slide a smartphone into, mid-range (£200-£400) self-contained headsets that you download experiences onto, or high-end equipment that you plug into a PC to run very detailed experiences from. 

Audience Experience

This is an interactive medium, often close in feeling to videogames, with controllers or the audience's hands being tracked to allow for interaction with the digital world of the experience. Unlike 360 degree videos, VR experiences can sometimes be moved through and explored, often called room-scale experiences, although some still require a stationary audience member.

Immersive Experience

What is it?

Any experience which attempts to transport an audience from their reality into a constructed artificial reality that can be perceived as real in one or several ways. They often use a lot of visual and audio content to achieve this, and other sensory stimuli, such as touch, smell, or temperature, can also be utilised to create the artificial world of the story or experience. 

How does it work?

Immersive experiences differ greatly in scale, medium, staging and format. At their core is a sense of ‘being in’ the story world, rather than merely watching. 

Audience Experience

They can exist for any sized audience, for sitting or moving audiences, and can use any amount of technology, including none, in order to achieve their desired level of immersion. Audiences may be guided through the experience or may be able to move through the experience at their own pace and make their own decisions on what to pay attention to or what to follow. If there is a story, it can either be linear, so everyone experiences the same story, or have multiple branches and points of interaction so people can choose which parts of the story they experience.

Videogame

What is it?

Videogames are an interactive medium that allows users to engage in fictional interactive worlds.  They often represent a combination of design disciplines and art forms including animation, film, graphics, sculpture, architectural and narrative design.

How does it work?

Videogames are generally experienced on a computer console and monitor/screen using input devices, such as a keyboard, joystick, game controllers and other haptic devices. Videogames can be played on smartphones, tablet devices, standalone consoles and on Virtual Reality headsets.

Screens can be embedded in specially designed installations or bespoke arcade cabinet style furniture, creating a more site-specific and intentional experience for audiences.

Audience Experience

Videogames often aim to entertain or educate; they are interactive, and the content delivery of the experience is (generally) pre-programmed. 

Videogames can be experimental, complex and unexpected in the way they tell stories. It is worth noting how videogames—and the tools and techniques used to make or exhibit them—have increasingly become used for artistic expression.

Note: Broader Screen Content resources will be focusing on videogames as a way for audiences to engage with a story that requires a level of interaction from them, in order to drive the narrative along or to explore the story’s ‘world’.

Find out more about Videogames

In 2024, BFI London Film Festival introduced a free gaming lounge to Expanded, their programme of immersive art and extended reality (XR). The Games Lounge showcased five creative projects that exist at the intersection of game culture and interactive arts, playfully exploring alternative storytelling methods and diverse approaches to audience interaction and game design.

FACT (Liverpool) recently presented an 8-month long free exhibition dedicated to showcasing games created by digital artists and independent videogame developers. Art Plays Games looked at how artists are increasingly using games as a way to challenge conventional forms of storytelling and offer us new ways to make sense of the world today.

V&A South Kensington’s ‘Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt’, a major exhibition in 2018-2019 that explored the design and culture of contemporary videogames. An archive of interesting resources, events and digital content relevant to understanding contemporary videogame culture can be found here.

International touring exhibition GamePlay presents ‘digital games’ in a gallery/exhibition venue context. See the exhibition information from MO Museum (Vilnius, Lithuania) and ZKM Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe, Germany) for good contemporary descriptions of videogames as creative, cultural content.

More useful links

For a deeper look at immersive and interactive experiences, see the following guides and resources: