If the category of offerings known as “immersive experiences” were a soup, it would probably have to be a gumbo—a saucy and colorful assemblage of potentially disparate things. And while it’s rooted in familiar traditions, it’s also open to whatever bright new ideas or reinterpretations might turn up. This is the category in which you’ll find a growing list of concepts like escape rooms, high-tech art animations, virtual-reality pop-ups, and interactive, Instagram-ready dreamscapes. On the more traditional side, it also includes old-fashioned theme parks, haunted houses, and festivals. The industry had reached a steady simmer before the pandemic, hitting an estimated $61.8 billion in 2019, and is roaring back to life now that people are eager to emerge from their houses and indulge their senses in something new.

Illustrations by Eric Nyquist

Illustrations by Eric Nyquist

For all the variety of immersive experiences, they do share one through line: multisensory engagement. From a theater perspective, Sleep No More has been encouraging audiences to get up from their seats and join the theatrics—literally chasing actors or wandering the space freely—since 2009. Theater of the Mind is a Denver-based co-creation of Mala Gaonkar (MBA 1996) and the former front man of the Talking Heads, David Byrne, that promises a mind-bending experience steeped in neuroscience. (Side effects, it warns, “may include a distrust of your own senses, a disorientation of self, and a mild to severely good time.”)

Even traditional art institutions are jumping into it: A number of venerable institutions have hosted immersive exhibits, and now a whole section of the Venice International Film Festival is dedicated to virtual-reality installations, 360-degree videos, or live performances. It’s a space where the business models, like the ideas behind them, are still expanding outward. Estimates by Grand View Research predict the industry will keep growing at a compound annual rate of 34 percent, at least through the next five years.

The origin of that growth curve can be traced back almost 25 years, when business scholars B. Joseph Pine II and James Gilmore published “Welcome to the Experience Economy” in the Harvard Business Review. The authors assumed that once we were all drenched in opportunities for consumption, companies would no longer be able to distinguish themselves by the cost of their goods or the quality of services. The next step in what they referred to as the “progression of economic value” would require engaging consumers experientially, “on an emotional, physical, intellectual, or even spiritual level.”

Just as Pine and Gilmore predicted, we have arrived in the “golden age of the experience economy,” according to David Askaryan (MBA 2015), founder and CEO of the Museum of Future Experiences (MoFE). It taps into a very basic human instinct, he says. “You could look at any number of ancient rituals, or even just the practice of sitting around a campfire telling stories, but humans have always been experientially driven. What’s new right now is the technology and the scalability that it offers.”

Gnosis—MoFE’s latest Brooklyn, NY–based show—is a high-tech exploration of the timeless question, Who are you? The hour-long production, taken in through a virtual-reality headset with 3D spatial sound design, invites the audience on a journey of self-discovery. “We think that showing people something they’ve never seen before is the best mechanism to inspire awe or wonder, or to expand their perspective. Those feelings are rare these days, given how systematized and data-driven storytelling is,” Askaryan acknowledges.

MoFE’s next act will take a leap into digital distribution, such that anyone with a VR headset will be able to subscribe to the museum’s universe and participate in its experiences from home. While Askaryan anticipates that such immersive platforms will become ubiquitous, he doesn’t think we’ll ultimately live in a realm that’s purely digital: “I think we’ll end up in a world where the digital is overlaid on the real world, and you can go back and forth between the offline and online ecosystem. We’re going to have both,” he predicts.

Meow Wolf is headed that way, too. A wildly popular arts and entertainment company with more than 2 million visitors a year, across three locations, Meow Wolf started in 2008 as decidedly offline. The founders were a group of artists who felt alienated from the high-brow gallery scene in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They initially assembled sculptures from found objects and unveiled them at warehouse parties. By 2016, the artist collective had organized its first ticketed installation and had soon earned the designation of the most Instagrammed location in the state. In 2021, it opened the Meow Wolf Convergence Station, a 90,000-square-foot installation in Denver, Colorado. (For comparison, the Whitney Museum of American Art has 50,000 square feet of gallery space.) In 2022, Jose Tolosa (MBA 2004) was brought on board as CEO to what had become a VC- and PE-backed, certified B corporation. The New York Times called it the “great hope of the experience economy.”

The company has skyrocketed right in pace with the expansion of the industry, but its focus is squarely on doing its own thing, Tolosa says. Its installations are a combination of interactive storytelling with unique takes on sculptural art, responsive technology, audio, video, and performance—all of which makes more sense when you see it. Meow Wolf is releasing an app next year that will add to the functionality of the in-person experience, with inspiration from the gaming world and to satisfy the demands of fans to engage with Meow Wolf before and after a visit.

“It takes a lot to get people out of the house,” concedes Tolosa, who worked previously at the entertainment conglomerate ViacomCBS. In an era when new films are released straight to streaming and top-notch home-theater setups, “You need to offer more than just passive consumption of video to be successful outside the home. I think that’s why we’re seeing this diversification of immersive experiences and why, at Meow Wolf, we are presenting something extremely unique.”

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