How can the immersive industry that has gone viral continue to thrive?
2024-07-30
In the immersive street life district of "Chang'an Twelve Hours" in Xi'an, listening to Tang music and changing into favorite ancient costumes feels like traveling back to the prosperous era of the Tang Dynasty thousands of years ago; At the Botanical Garden of Beijing Shiyuan Park, with a gentle tap of your finger, the jungle world from billions of years ago greets you, as if you were embarking on a prehistoric adventure; At the performance of the immersive drama "Sleepless Night" in Shanghai, the audience interacts while watching, and in the blink of an eye, they become the characters in the drama... In recent years, a series of immersive experience projects have sprung up like mushrooms after rain. The reporter searched for the word "immersion" on a certain ticketing platform, and various projects such as immersive interactive drama, immersive music live, immersive exploration experience exhibition, etc. came into view, and many projects had hot ticket sales. The development and prosperity of the immersion industry are brought about by the belief that 'everything can be immersed'. The 2024 White Paper on the Development of China's Immersive Industry shows that as of 2023, the number of immersive experience projects in China has reached 32024, with a total output value of 193.34 billion yuan, and is expected to exceed 240 billion yuan this year. After the emergence of immersive experiences, how to innovate and improve quality, and maintain their magnetic attraction to consumers, has become an urgent problem for the healthy and sustainable development of the industry. Hundreds of new business models are emerging at a dock on Wufu Road Jiangtan in Hankou, Wuhan. A retro steam cruise ship, the "Zhiyin", is docked at the dock, modeled after the "Jianghua Wheel" of Wuhan Minsheng Company in the 1930s. There are a total of 98 cabins on board, each corner carefully crafted according to dramatic scenes. We disguised ourselves as passengers boarding the ship with tickets and entered the private rooms according to the ticket numbers. Along the way, we met gentlemen wearing hats, ladies wearing cheongsams, young men polishing leather shoes, and also saw many vintage items Not long ago, Guangdong tourist Liu Xinyu, who had just experienced the "Zhiyin Express", told reporters that after the "Zhiyin Express" set sail, the entire drama was performed simultaneously in all areas, and tourists felt like they were transported through time and space, to Wuhan a hundred years ago. The boat is on the river, and people are in the play. This is the immersive performance site of the key innovative cultural and tourism project "Zhiyin Hao" in Hubei Province. Liu Xinyu said that unlike the traditional theater performance where the audience sits upright in the audience seat, on a cruise ship, the audience can freely move around in the cabin, immersing themselves in the stories happening in every corner and potentially influencing the direction of the story. Zhiyin Hao "is a typical case of immersive performing arts. At present, the immersive industry also covers 16 segmented markets such as immersive cultural tourism, themed entertainment, art exhibitions, augmented reality, and commercial spaces, including hundreds of representative formats such as escape rooms, murder mystery, immersive performances, virtual reality experience halls, immersive costume changing experience halls, and light and shadow art exhibitions. Currently, the transformation of the socio-economic form towards the experience economy has promoted the development of the immersion industry Associate Professor Wu Fan from the School of Media and Communication at Shanghai Jiao Tong University stated in an interview with the Workers' Daily that the core of the immersive industry is to build immersive experiences, which is committed to creating a sense of presence and interaction in consumer scenarios such as cultural entertainment and artistic enjoyment, with the goal of seeking deeper connections with the audience. The immersive industry brings a new engine of growth. "Previously, I played an immersive Western cowboy themed murder mystery game, where costumes, makeup, and props completely replicated the Western cowboy style. Each player wore specific character costumes and collected evidence and clues in the pre built scene." Mr. Cheng, a 90s murder mystery enthusiast, said that immersive murder mystery games allow players to deeply participate in the game through carefully arranged plots and interesting interactive performances, providing a rich experience. Luo Xuexue, the person in charge of a murder mystery shop in Beijing, told reporters that in recent years, players' demands for murder mystery games have become increasingly high. In order to provide players with a better gaming experience, some shops have transformed tourists from bystanders to participants through methods such as real scene evidence collection, room soft decoration, and costume changing performances. Luo Xuexue believes that the popularity of immersive experiences is related to the rise of experiential economy and scenario based consumption. Nowadays, the consumption demands of young customers have gradually shifted from 'I have been here' to 'I have experienced it deeply', paying more attention to freshness, experience, and interactivity. Merchants must keep up with this change in order to attract more customers, "said Luo Xuexue. The consumption upgrade characterized by personalization, presence, and self enjoyment has driven the rapid growth of the cultural and entertainment market. In addition, the hard power of digital technology leads innovation, and the integration and co construction of cultural and technological innovation also brings new vitality to the development of immersive industries Wu Fan stated that the cultural industry has enormous growth potential, and the experience economy represented by the immersive industry is an important growth engine. The immersive industry is not only favored by consumers, but also by capital. Jiang Jie, CEO of Mirage International Immersive Industry Platform, stated that among the 26 countries with mature immersive industries worldwide, China ranks among the top in terms of project quantity, consumer market size, investment scale, and total output value. Attention should be paid to content creation and IP management. Although "everything can be immersed", it is difficult to generalize how much immersion can be achieved. The reporter learned that there are still problems in China's immersive industry, such as insufficient influence of original IP and uneven quality. In consumer feedback, there are also many roast such as "more and more similar experiences", "blindly pursuing cool effects" and "expensive tickets". Taking immersive theater as an example, a theater information blogger in Shanghai told reporters that currently, many immersive theater tickets on the market are around 200 to 400 yuan, with some expensive ones costing thousands of yuan. However, the overall quality of the performance market varies greatly. The blogger stated, "Many projects are severely homogenized, and some dramas are poorly produced, just creating a scene and interacting with the audience, selling high prices under the guise of immersive drama to harvest fans." In this regard, Wu Fan believes that content creation and IP management in the immersive industry are the key to the success or failure of projects, but currently the industry attaches more importance to investment in technology and hardware equipment, while neglecting investment in soft power such as content creation and intellectual property. In this regard, cultural content management must be the core, based on IP research and development, striving to create more profound and well crafted content works, and continuously accumulating brand cultural assets. When designing every immersive experience, practitioners should ask themselves whether they have created humanistic value, as well as emotional, aesthetic, social, self presentation, and other values. If immersive experience is treated as a pure business, then the larger the investment, the more technology is piled up, and the stronger the one-way expression of demands, the less consumers will pay Jiang Jie said that ultimately, the immersive industry should enable consumers to feel the value of immersive experiences and showcase the creativity and sincerity of designers. (New Society)
Edit：He Chuanning Responsible editor：Su Suiyue
Source：Worker Daily
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