Our 2025 Year in Review and an Immersive Design Manifesto
This started as a 'year-in-review' sizzle reel, and it turned into a manifesto.
This video is a supercut of *almost* everything we've built in the last year, from December 2024 to now. It will give you a nice little taste of what we've achieved, but it also only just barely scratches the surface.
While putting this together, it forced me to reflect on the decisions we've made about how we design immersive experiences at Composit and what seems to make our approach unique.
So, here are 5 critical insights from nearly 10 years of building immersive experiences for Training, Education and Marketing where removing abstractions was the goal (and not necessarily about achieving 'realism'). Do I think this is the only way to do it? No, but it’s how WE like to do it. And while some of these things may seem VERY obvious, they are still not as ubiquitous as you would think.
Show, Don’t Tell 🤫
Probably the hardest part of designing these sorts of immersive interactive experiences is how to convey information through action and not text or dialogue. Another, more academic way of describing this process is ‘removing layers of abstraction of information’. Most of the time, we’re trying to get as close as possible to the true feeling of baking the experience of the task into the muscle memory of the user, and as such, the other items in this list all exist to meet this goal. After all, you’ve gone to all the effort of getting someone into the headset, why then would you hit them with a wall of text or character dialogue that they could have just read off their phone? Rather, we need to figure out how the player can learn by doing. When pundits of VR talk about increased knowledge retention, this is where it starts - through good interaction design that uses the full bandwidth of the medium.
Design for Hand Tracking First ✋🏻
People know how to use their hands. Crazy, right? Controllers are great for games, where 'grip handle' style interactions dominate or where an extra level of precision is crucial. But for everything else, they simply become an additional layer of abstraction that makes onboarding slow and unintuitive. If we look forward to our immersive future, interfaces will slowly disappear and along with them, the humble controller. But ultimately, if 'realism' and 1:1 interactions is our goal, adding that extra friction of translating one interaction to another, doesn't really make sense. For tradeshows and exhibitions this is even more evident when the time lost to fitting and explaining controllers and button mappings becomes a real drag.
Scale is King 📐
Nothing breaks immersion faster than making the user feel like a toy in a dollhouse. Having come from an Industrial Design background, it took me a long time to shake the habit of designing 3D props to within hundredths of a millimeter. But even the biggest studios still get scale wrong sometimes (Batman Arkham Shadow features books on the shelf the size of your torso) which is largely a symptom of 3D artists who are used to 'eyeballing' it. As humans, we know intuitively how big objects should be and you simply can't sweep incorrect scale under the rug.
On the flipside, being able to portray scale accurately is precisely one of VR's superpowers, being able to convey something instantly in a way that a 2D screen can never achieve.
Environmental Storytelling through Great Artistry 🎨
I've seen debates on LinkedIn about how much effort should be put into creating environments for training experiences. Or, how much effort should be put into what some people think of as window dressing versus the lesson itself? The bandwidth of information that you can convey through environment alone is massive, especially when the environment forms part of the lesson or experience. It provides crucial context while also preparing user’s for the realities of the task ahead.'Show, don't tell' once again, as the saying goes.
Human Actors for Human Characters 👩🏻🦰
If you want to make your experience feel alive, then fill it with living people. Meta's visual showcase piece 'North Star' features full AI characters and is the best advertisement I've seen for not using AI characters. They are lifeless, robotic and frequently mis-pronounce words. I fully acknowledge that for some experiences, localisation goals may make this step prohibitive, but creating avatars with realistic full-body and facial animations is not as hard as you think (I will be creating a tutorial soon for my peers to steal our process) and we have found it to be totally worth the extra effort. Well voiced and acted characters provide a great way to guide your players and draw them into the experience.