THE IMMERSION AWARDS
About, Details, & Info
Experiential artists inspire and shape the future of immersive entertainment every time a guest steps into a new world.
The Immersion Awards are Immersion Nation’s way of lending recognition to the creators of truly exceptional immersive experiences that have furthered the medium and contributed to building the immersive community as a whole.
Timeline
Nomination and eligibility
The nominations for the Immersion Nation Awards are selected and rendered eligible based on three primary criteria
The first being how accurately an experience represents the category it is nominated for.
Because of the fantastic variety of experiences, represented and presented in different mediums, the assessment of ‘alignment’ takes into consideration a wide range of factors. Some of these factors include the thoughts and opinions of experience attendees. The format of the experience. The content and presentation. The conceptual intent of the experience as explained by creators. The tangible effect of the experience as expressed via reviews, community opinion, and the tenor and content of the conversation around the experience by attendees.
The second criterion is size.
The Immersion Nation Awards is largely oriented away from massive enterprise size immersive experiences. While any exact delineation of size as a qualifier would apply too much rigidity to immersion as an incredibly diverse artistic field, it is important to us that we avoid the prioritization of experiences such as those created by Disney. Disney creates astounding experiences, but they do not represent the majority of creators propelling the systemic change that is immersive entertainment. Though we do mitigate the influence of the scale of an experience in the voting process as well, preventing the over-indexing and over prioritization of experiences in the nomination process helps us look at the most diverse cross-section of immersive experiences from the initial stage of nominee selection.
The third nominee criteria is safety and the effective avoidance of systemic evil-ness.
Any experience that has meaningful issues with the safety of guests, actors, or any person involved in the experience in the course of creation or attendance is subject to removal from consideration for nomination. The latitude afforded in the word ‘meaningful’ allows an envelope of tolerance that takes into consideration that different experiences may include different levels of extremity of risk to all involved. I.e. The risk associated with attending a haunted house will always be more significant than that of attending a pillow and stuffed animal-themed family-friendly experience. Evil-ness is characterized by the intent, responsibility, and due diligence of all involved in any given experience.
Other Notes
We will expand the scope of awards in 2020 to encompass a more dynamic field of nominees. That will likely extend to a variety of size categories, experience run duration, experience location, virtual reality experiences, international experiences, etc. For this year we are focusing to a greater degree on experiences that are medium to small interactive and independent immersive experience that would not be categorized as one-time brand activations, or experiences with very isolated runs. This is to allow the awards to serve the potential guests of immersive experiences across the county to the greatest degree possible.
Voting
Voting takes place from Monday, January 27th to Friday, February 7th. An individual can only vote once. Votes are compiled from the Immersion Awards voting page, accessible from the button at the top of this page. If there are multiple votes in one category from a single email address, the second -and any subsequent- vote(s) will be disregarded unless the ‘I changed my mind’ checkbox is selected during the resubmission of the form. The voting deadline is set at midnight in your respective time zone on the final day of the voting period.
Contact
Please contact Immersion Nation with any questions, comments, or if you’re just in the mood for some zesty conversation about the wide and wild world of immersive experience.
