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Introduction

Imagine a future in which you can feel your favourite stories – sensing the heat and vibration of a high-speed car chase or crunching leaves under your feet as you walk towards a deserted house in the woods. In real life, we experience the world in multiple ways at once: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, even sensing our own heartbeats. If the technologies of the future can simulate multisensory experience more fully, this will bring our imagined worlds to life more vividly, delivering more meaningful engagement, intense emotions and longer-lasting memories for audiences.

This hub is designed to help make that future a reality, providing insights, tips and resources for working inclusively with the senses. Think of it less like a report you read and more like one you explore – a richly interactive map of multisensory ideas, references and design nudges which you can lift straight into production.

Why multisensory now? ​

Multisensory work matters: it can deepen presence and emotion as well as create longer-lasting memories. Multisensory Value There is also a growing appetite for immersive, interactive and multisensory events, particularly where they support meaningful emotional engagement. Audience trends towards multisensory

But more sensation isn't the point. The point is the right sensation, at the right time, grounded in purpose. Indeed,* less sensation* can often be more! Multisensory experience

Inclusion isn't a bolt-on and multisensory isn't automatically inclusive ​

Openness is required when creating inclusive multisensory experiences, as we cannot presume to know what all users need. For instance, while the introduction of haptics is often considered helpful for all blind individuals, preferences, abilities and situations vary significantly. Treating haptics as a tick-box inclusion measure risks overlooking this diversity and may act to limit creative exploration for inclusion. Multisensory experience

The temptation to add new and exciting sensations also brings with it a risk of overload. When sensory input becomes too overwhelming for someone, tools like sensory guides and refuge spaces can matter just as much as the effects themselves. Multisensory Value

Design lessons you can use immediately ​

1) Lo-fi can do serious heavy lifting... if it's motivated In Current, Rising** – a location-based hyper-reality opera combining Virtual Reality (VR) with free-roam movement, wind, floor vibrations and more – audiences reported that blowing wind and free movement had the greatest impact on their sense of presence. However, Figment Productions– the company that created Current, Rising – reported that one of the best sensory effects they ever delivered was created far more simply, via gravel glued onto hardboard that people walked on. It cost only a few pounds, yet it made a huge boost to immersion. Current, Rising

Tip: Even very simple sensory effects can have significant impact if they are clearly connected to the audience's expectations. Context and motivation matter.

2) Chase quality of experience, not just quality of service**

There is a clear and highly practical distinction between what technical teams measure – quality of service, such as bandwidth, jitter, latency – and what audiences perceive – quality of experience, including smoothness, responsiveness, comfort and immersion. These two aspects don't always align. For example, our brain can tolerate small timing mismatches, so absolute zero latency isn't always necessary. Latency tolerances

Tip: Decide what must be tight, typically: action → visual response, and where you can spend a little slack, usually in secondary cues. Then test early with diverse user groups. Latency tolerances

3) The smallest effect often gets remembered

DARKFIELD's Arcade is a strong example of story-first sensory approach: binaural sound in pitch blackness, a branching narrative and the principle that often the smallest effect can have the biggest impact. The water spray, sensed as the splashing of blood in the experience, is the one most people remember, because it's integral to augmenting the audio aspect it accompanies. Arcade

Tip: Ask direct questions during reviews. For example: "If we removed this effect, would the meaning of the moment change?" If not, it's likely decoration, rather than storytelling.

What next? ​

This Hub will evolve and grow, expanding through industry engagement and original new research, and eventually also incorporating shareable multisensory tools.

We feel that this reflects the true spirit of multisensory design – that it is not a fixed set of rules, but rather a shared, living set of ever-improving patterns. These are tested in real rooms, with real people, through open discussion. And sometimes it's still about gravel glued to hardboard.

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