Immersion Without Headsets: Expanding the Concept Beyond Virtual Reality Technologies

Immersion is commonly conceptualized in virtual reality (VR) research as a technological property, often defined through display fidelity, sensorimotor contingencies, or interactional bandwidth. Such device-centered perspectives capture only one dimension of immersion and do not fully account for the experiential ways in which individuals become absorbed in an environment, narrative, or activity. This article reconceptualizes immersion as a modality-independent experiential state emerging from the interplay of subjective factors, system and content properties, and engagement processes. Immersive experience, it argues, can arise in both mediated and non-mediated contexts, including memorial sites, museum exhibitions, and analogue narratives. From this perspective, VR becomes educationally relevant not because it uniquely produces immersion, but because it can enable immersive experiences when real-world access is limited, impractical, or pedagogically constrained. Interpreting immersion as a modality-independent, relational construct provides a clearer basis for evaluating VR’s pedagogical affordances and underscores that immersive learning depends on instructional design and learner preparation rather than technological fidelity alone.