This chapter describes the immersive multimedia's role in our lives, educational activities, and business, and social media benefits from the growth of this emerging reality. Consequently, this chapter analyses the impact and the use for immersive multimedia in different contexts. In the modern world, technological advancement led to the discovery of the powerful application of multimedia. Education and learning systems have significant contribution to improve this field of research. This chapter is going to help expanded the knowledge and information about multimedia in general and immersive multimedia in particular, and its strong influences on education. How technological innovation can be used by external stakeholders to direct and promote innovation in education, how teaching can benefit from the proximity to technology, and how social networks can seize the advantages of an immersive system are some of the answers the authors try to find in this chapter.
TopIntroduction
The immersive multimedia history began with the concept of virtual reality. In the late 1960s, some of the developer’s needs (programmers and artists) were to create experiences digitally made through interactive multimedia. This became known as virtual reality since they produce ‘near-to-reality’ outputs. Currently, virtual reality can be seen as computer-created environment that users can experience through the senses of sight, hearing and touch. Immersive multimedia is a combination of multimedia elements and Interactivity in virtual reality. On other hand, the Immersion concept and practice is redefining several areas like education, live production industries, arts, and providing new experiences in publics through a combination of creative development and technical innovation.
The companies unites the efforts of directors, artists, programmers, designers, producers and technical specialists, resulting in a deeply collaborative and multidisciplinary approach to making immersive installations, live stage shows, and creative explorations.
Virtual reality and immersive environments are research lines that can be applied to various domains such as scientific or educational. Immersive digital media needs new approaches regarding its interactive and immersive features, which means the new narratives and relationships with users must be rethought. The Immersive term refers to reality simulation computer generated with physical, spatial and visual dimensions. This technology can be interactive and used by different persons with different needs. Architects, engineers, and digital artists are the professionals who take the most advantage from this technology, but industries like entertainment and digital video games are examples of potential creators and users that can create content and projects. Virtual Reality system can simulate everything from aircraft flight simulation to computer games (3D), passing through a simulation from a walkthrough of a building prior to the construction, which means that it is not necessary to invest in the physical objects creation, but it must be done in the virtual environment. As immersive elements becomes more efficient and integrates the technology, it may be available for a wide range of applications. It requires well designed user interfaces and different contents for the new generation like mobile devices, computer games, distributed web systems and desktop application. Immersive and interactive technologies like virtual reality are a new milestone in the form we interact with virtual worlds, and even how we apprehend new methods in our relationship with real world. The Information and Communication Technologies have a high potential for transforming the reality and the way we interact with real things. Virtual reality can be a major tool to potency changes in social reality itself, it is necessary to define and analyze its potential implications and influence on how new media and communication technologies can create new messages and cultural approaches (based on the initial idea of McLuhan “The Medium is the Message”) (McLuhan & Fiore, 1967).
In this chapter, we consider virtual reality not only as a technological tool but also a concept related with the power and possibilities of supporting new emerging realities never seen or experienced before. Virtual reality is therefore a technology with many interactive possibilities, especially in an immersive approach related with images and sounds, but also with the possibility of covering other human senses and perceptive channels. The possibilities of creating innovative languages based on the whole range of human perception are almost unlimited, and depend on technological evolution in the first stage. In this chapter, languages are understood as ways of interacting with technology on the expression of cultural reality (Kramsch, 1998) as well as a natural language interface.