Research
Immersive experience addresses the body, not just the mind. It produces embodied knowledge: felt before it is understood, registering in the senses before it reaches language. When experience is spatially enveloping, multisensory, and shaped by the audience's own behaviour, it activates the affective registers through which people form attachment and concern. The consortium investigates three properties that make this possible: spatial immersion, multisensory simultaneity, and agency.
Ecological fieldwork forms the foundation of each research track. Working groups go into the field with mixed teams of artists, scientists, designers, and students: into archives, to field stations, into habitats. They gather source material, test early prototypes in situ, and learn from each other's methods.
Artistic research is one investigative method among several. Questions about presence, agency, and embodied cognition are addressed through making and testing with audiences. Phenomenological analysis of what actually happens inside an immersive experience is part of how the research is evaluated and iterated.
The consortium also draws on ecological and scientific research methods through its institutional partners. NIOO and Naturalis contribute scientific expertise, field access, and research themes drawn from active programmes. TU Delft provides prototyping labs and technical research capacity, bridging the work between artistic intent and material and technological realisation.
Design research runs across all of this: iterative prototyping, playtesting, and systematic public feedback shape each work from early concept to final form. The results of this process accumulate into a concrete output: an open-access IX design toolkit covering methods, guidelines, and documented prototypes, available to practitioners and researchers working in this field.
Naturalis
Naturalis connects the consortium to active scientific programmes, specimen collections, and researchers working at the frontier of biodiversity research. Research themes are drawn from their current scientific agenda.
NIOO-KNAW
NIOO brings ecological research into the dynamics of ecosystems: how they function, how they respond to disturbance, and how intervention can shift outcomes. Their field stations and research programmes provide direct access to ecological processes in action.
ARTIS
ARTIS anchors the track concerned with how humans already encounter and relate to non-human life. Their expertise in public mediation, their facilities, and their audiences make them a testing ground for how IX can shift that encounter.
The research produced by the consortium is published openly. Design guidelines, methodological frameworks, field documentation, and prototype records are made available as an open-access IX design toolkit: a concrete, reusable resource for practitioners and researchers working at the intersection of ecology and immersive experience.