Immersive Design Experiences

Don't go it alone - collaborate to deliver global impact with your research! Delighted to share findings from our newly published pilot-scale study on CO₂ capture heat integration. It's exciting not only because of new approach to reducing the reboiler duty by 6% and cooling duty by 24%, resulting in operating cost savings of CO2 capture. It's exciting because it proves that collaboration is essential for credible, impactful research. Our team brought together multi-institutional expertise, industrial partners, and real-world site access on a coal-fired power plant. This work was possible because this collaboration enabled: - Access to infrastructure - Operating a mobile pilot on a live power plant requires partnerships beyond any single lab. - Data rigour - Validating marginal energy gains demanded cross-disciplinary expertise, including thermodynamics, advanced data reconciliation, and process engineering. - Industrial validation - Co-developing with site operators built credibility and practical insight from day one. - Diverse expertise - Chemistry + engineering + simulation + field operations. Individual researchers miss insights that teams can easily identify. The lesson: Impact = great ideas + rigorous execution + real-world validation. Collaboration is how you deliver all three. If you're pursuing energy research with genuine traction, treat collaboration as a core strategy, not optional. Build networks early. Your best work will come from teams you haven't yet assembled. #science #research #scientist #researcher #professor #phd #CCUS #engineering

My trip to 🇯🇵 Japan changed my life. Here are 3 profound lessons any PM, designer, or founder can take from Japanese culture. As a founder, it’s tough to stop thinking about your product – even on vacation. Throughout my week-long trip, Japan’s culture, cities, and way of life continually inspired me to build a better product at Clueso (YC W23). 1️⃣ 🚽 Design your product like a Japanese bathroom: Japanese bathrooms have buttons everywhere. There are buttons to run the shower, buttons to heat up a bubble bath, and not to mention five different ways to clean your butt after you poop. Despite all the labels being in Japanese, I was still able to figure out how to operate things. The iconography made it super intuitive to understand what each button did. It’s very important for a user to know what a button will do before they click on it. Especially in a bathroom setting, the last thing you want is water spraying in all directions when you’re butt-naked on the toilet. Being able to communicate what a button does without words in this manner is extremely important. Having words everywhere can clog up the screen and make your product intimidating, especially when you have a lot of features. 2️⃣ 🚍 Serve your customers like a Japanese bus driver: The bus drivers in Japan are amongst the most polite people I have ever met. I don’t think I have friends who get as happy to see me. When you get on, they greet you with a smile, and when you get off, they say a most enthusiastic “Arigato”. They’re extremely well-dressed and well-groomed too. Each bus is also equipped with an automated change-dispensing machine. This greatly minimizes lines and wait times at each stop. Building such internal tools (that are outside your core product) to improve internal efficiency can make a huge impact while serving customers. Inspired by this, we recently developed an internal announcements app at Clueso that broadcasts product updates to all our customers. 3️⃣ 🏙 Build fast, and be ready to rebuild from scratch: Meticulous planning can only take you so far; inevitably, customers will take you in directions that you couldn’t have anticipated, and you have to be ready to delete a lot of code and rebuild from scratch. Japan's cities are a perfect example of this. It’s insane to think how, just about seventy years ago, most of Japan’s large cities (like Tokyo and Hiroshima) were completely reduced to dust by the war. Today, these cities are easily among the most impressive cities I’ve seen anywhere in the world. The speed at which the Japanese people got together to rebuild their country is a massive inspiration for everyone. If you're thinking of visiting #Japan, stop thinking. Go! 🙂

Creativity is a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it becomes. And one of the best ways I’ve discovered to exercise that muscle? Exposure. Real, high-quality exposure. Not just scrolling through feeds or watching tutorials, but traveling, truly immersing yourself in experiences that push your perspective. Now, when I say travel, I don’t just mean museums, monuments, or art galleries (though those are amazing). I mean conversations with strangers, observing how they live, tasting unfamiliar foods, discovering small cultural habits, and letting yourself get lost in places that make you feel slightly out of your comfort zone. Those moments spark ideas you didn’t even know were possible. I’ve personally seen it transform my own creativity, the way I design, the way I approach problems, even the stories I tell on Instagram. Every trip, every interaction, every small discovery adds another layer to how I think, how I visualize, and how I create. So here’s my advice…treat creativity like a muscle. Expose yourself to the world, push boundaries, and don’t just observe but immerse. Your work, your ideas, and even your personal growth will thank you.

Everyone says 'immersive' or 'simulation' and now 'experiential'! What do they mean? How do they differ - why is it important? Immersive, simulation and experiential get used as if they're interchangeable. They're not - and mixing them up can be an expensive and disastrous way to find out. The Confusion. A training brief asks for something 'immersive' when what it actually needs is a simulation, judged on whether a skill transfers to a real task. An 'experiential' brief gets treated like a simulation, held to an accuracy standard nobody in the audience will ever notice or care about. Same display hardware, completely different success criteria - and a different content pipeline behind each one. Three Words - Three Jobs. Immersive describes display architecture: how much of the viewer's field of view an image fills, and whether it wraps continuously across surfaces. Simulation describes fidelity: how accurately content represents a real task. Experiential describes audience effect: what people remember and feel. A project can combine any of the three, or none. What goes wrong is buying one while specifying another. Why It Costs Real Money. Get the category wrong and you commission the wrong content pipeline - AI-converted material where precision native stereo capture was actually required, or an accuracy budget spent on detail nobody in the audience will ever notice. In this edition I've pulled the three apart properly: where they genuinely overlap, where native stereo capture becomes non-negotiable rather than a nice-to-have, and how the distinction plays out across medical, defence and architecture applications. At Greg Jeffreys Consulting Ltd (GJC) we work at the forefront of these fields, with a current obsession with demystifying and democratising these 'black arts', creating designs using COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) components to create radical technical improvements and drastically lower entry-level costs. My newsletter 'Industry Standard' explores why the vocabulary around immersive, simulation and experiential technology gets muddled, and what that confusion actually costs buyers who don't separate the three. Subscribe: https://lnkd.in/ekQ3AdCb Which of the three are you actually specifying next time you write a brief? #AVTweeps #AVIXA #AVUserGroup #LTSMG #Schoms #ImmersiveDisplays #DigitalCanvas

A clever tourism concept—Vietnam is getting very good at turning seasonal natural beauty into immersive experiences. 🌾 “The Footprints of the Waterfall Season” – Terraced Rice Field Climbing Challenge Instead of promoting the usual “golden harvest” season, this taps into something less obvious: the water pouring season—when terraced rice fields become mirror-like landscapes. But what makes this interesting isn’t just the scenery. It’s the idea of turning nature into an experience: • Not just sightseeing → but participating • Not just a place → but a challenge • Not just beauty → but a story people can share This is experience design at its best. There’s a broader lesson here for business: People don’t engage with features. They engage with experiences. Whether it’s tourism or technology—if you can make people feel something, they will remember it (and share it). Curious to see more ideas like this emerging from Vietnam 🇻🇳? Video by: Vua An May

🪸🪸🪸 New paper out! 🪸🪸🪸 Immersive media has incredible potential to deepen our understanding and care for marine environments. But how can we use these technologies most effectively? We took a crucial step by assessing the field of ocean extended reality (ocean XR). Through our IREEF initiative (https://www.ireef.io/), Erika Woolsey, Danny Pimentel, and I analyzed nearly 100 ocean XR experiences, evaluating their alignment with the Essential Ocean Literacy Principles (https://lnkd.in/dGVXfzjK). Our study revealed key opportunities for the ocean XR community: 🐠 Maximize XR's unique strengths: Leverage affordances like spatial presence and interactivity to create truly impactful ocean XR experiences. 🐠 Foster global & equitable collaboration: Build cross-disciplinary and international partnerships, ensuring equitable inclusion of creators from underrepresented communities. 🐠 Prioritize research & impact: Conduct further research to examine the link between XR features and learning outcomes, especially concerning ocean literacy. We believe these insights can help shape a future where immersive media empowers greater ocean literacy and conservation. A huge thank you to Marina Psaros for her belief in this project! And special appreciation to our dedicated research assistants: Geraldine Iserentant, Felix S., and Amy Wentzel. We're also grateful to The Hydrous for their support. 🌊 Read the full paper here: https://lnkd.in/dK3EXQXf #ImmersiveMedia #StorytellingForChange #XRforImpact #ClimateAction #OceanLiteracy #UNOceanDecade #VirtualReality #VR #AugmentedReality #AR #SocialImpact #MarineConservation

Travelling Asia on my honeymoon gave me more than memories. It gave me a new outlook on all things digital. Across East and Southeast Asia, what struck me was how people interact differently with technology. In China, Alipay isn't just an app. It's infrastructure. QR code payments, ID verification, travel and reservations, all in one place. There's no Western equivalent? Then there was the Great Firewall. Arriving in China and trying to access Google, Instagram or WhatsApp was genuinely jarring. The scramble for a VPN. The realisation that the internet we take for granted is not a given. Meanwhile WeChat, Amap, and a whole ecosystem of Chinese apps were existing around me - a parallel digital world I had no native access to. Apps built for Chinese or Japanese character sets that completely fall apart when switched to English. Layouts broken, text truncated, logic lost. Cultural assumptions are baked into every design decision. You just can't see them until you're somewhere they don't apply. #digitaldesign #productthinking #global #lifeatsky

On my recent trip to Munich, I visited the BMW Group Museum and walked away with lessons on consistency, and performance that go far beyond cars. As a creative entrepreneur, I have been curious to learn more about brands and their storytelling methodology. The BMW Museum felt like a masterclass in translating philosophy into experience. 1/ Most visitors expect a collection of cars and engines. What you discover instead is a journey through identity. From the first models to futuristic prototypes, the museum is choreographed to show how design evolves while values remain constant. 2/ The installations themselves are stories in motion. The kinetic sculpture of hundreds of spheres moving in silence is unforgettable. It demonstrates that true performance is not about noise or speed. It is about rhythm, precision, and flow. 3/ The architecture mirrors the brand. Clean lines, transitions that feel seamless, and an almost obsessive attention to detail. Nothing is accidental. Everything signals clarity and intent. The hidden message is simple. BMW is not selling cars. They are selling trust, culture, and an unbroken line of consistency that has endured for over a century. True creative excellence lies in making choices that are invisible to most, but deeply felt by all. What do you think builds stronger brand loyalty, consistency of design, or the ability to reinvent? #technology #inspiration #creativity #future #design

With the rise of #VR applications, especially in #healthcare, #therapy, #gaming, and #training, it's important to understand how #immersive environments affect #emotions compared to non-immersive settings. In our latest paper in the journal #VirtualReality, we describe how different virtual environments influence emotions and the sense of control (#dominance) over one's environment (full-text access in the comment). We induced a range of emotional responses using film clips in both immersive (VR headset) and non-immersive (standard screen) environments. Participants’ physiological signals (#EEG, #ECG, #EDA, #respiration, skin #temperature, and #fNIRS) were recorded, and they also provided subjective ratings of their emotions. The data were then used to train #machinelearning models for detecting emotional states. Results: - There were no significant differences between immersive and non-immersive setups regarding #arousal (i.e., excitement or calmness) and #valence (i.e., perceived positivity or negativity of the emotional state); - However, there were significant differences in dominance (a measure of how much control or influence a person feels over their environment or experience) for specific emotional categories. Specifically, participants felt less in control when exposed to certain types of emotional stimuli (like horror and social negative clips) in the immersive VR setup compared to the non-immersive setup; - User-dependent machine learning models (i.e., models trained and tested using data from a single person) outperformed user-independent models (i.e., models trained on data from multiple people and aim to predict emotional states across a broader population). This finding is important for personalizing virtual environments to better suit individual emotional responses: when applied to virtual reality or immersive environments, such models can adapt to each user's emotional state more accurately, providing a tailored experience. Overall, our findings reveal the potential of emotion-sensitive VR applications and support the feasibility of real-time classification systems that can tailor virtual environments to users' emotional states. This has practical applications in fields such as mental health therapy, stress reduction, immersive training, and entertainment. Sergi Bermudez i Badia Alice Chirico

Airport lounges have always been built around status: credit cards and airline loyalty. But travelers? They’re often jet-lagged, dehydrated, overstimulated, and honestly... in need of a vacation from their vacation. That got me thinking: What if an airport lounge wasn’t designed around exclusivity, but recovery instead? That inspired my latest concept: Aēsop In Transit. Part washroom, part reset room, and a moment to woosah. A place to wash your face, drink a cup of tea, sit in silence, and let your body catch up to your itinerary. I chose Aesop because they’ve always designed beyond the product. Their stores have never just been about skincare, but about how a space makes you feel, often drawing inspiration from the local geography and culture. So I asked myself: What if that same thinking lived in an airport? A quiet check-in that signals a shift away from the chaos. A monumental washroom where the sink becomes the centerpiece. Reset rooms and quiet pods for travelers who need time to decompress before their next flight. Products integrated into moments of care rather than displayed solely to maximize exposure. I believe the best designers anticipate what people need before they ask for it. When we design for how people feel, not just what they buy, commerce becomes a byproduct rather than the objective. The future of travel isn’t another premium tier. It’s designing for wellness and recovery.