Immersive worlds: the new battleground for brands

There’s a line I keep coming back to, from the architect Cedric Price in the 1960s: “Technology is the answer — but what was the question?” Before any brand rushes into immersive worlds, that’s the question to sit with. Do we need it to live faster? To sell more? After a decade building augmented and virtual reality, I’ve learned that the teams who start from why build things people actually use. The ones who start from “we need a virtual world” build expensive ghost towns.

What these immersive worlds actually are

Step back and look at the pattern of media: books, recording, cinema, radio, TV, the internet, mobile, social. And now, what? Each wave asked the same question: where does the information go? Does it stay on a flat 2D screen, or can I be inside it? Call it spatial computing, AR/VR, or immersive worlds — the label people reach for changes every few years. The real shift is simpler: the new position of information, and shared 3D spaces you can enter, build in, and transact in.

It’s still the Wild West, so here’s a working definition of an immersive branded world: a virtual space + virtual content + a simple avatar + communicating with others + the ability to purchase or engage.

Two rules that matter most

1. No one owns it. These worlds work like the internet — no single company owns the space. You’re a participant, not a tenant. It’s for everyone: any size, any avatar, even any level of quality.

2. It has to be open. Think of a JPEG — you can open it, print it, send it anywhere, and it just works. Immersive content is still searching for that universal standard. The practical version of “open” is interoperability: an item created once should work in a virtual space, be viewable in augmented reality, and connect to a smart contract — the same file, everywhere, no app or gatekeeper. Get that right and you’ve found something close to the standard.

This isn’t about wearing glasses. It’s about wanting to engage with people and information in a different way.

Why brands are pouring in

Because the audience is already there, and it spends. A few cases I point to (figures are roughly as reported): a sneaker drop selling 600 pairs in about seven minutes; a luxury bag reselling inside a gaming world for around $4,000 across thousands of purchases; Balenciaga, Burberry, Ferrari all launching branded worlds. The headline example is the Travis Scott concert in Fortnite — somewhere north of 12 million visitors and roughly $17 million in items sold.

And crucially, most of this happens without a crypto wallet. The number of actual NFT owners is small; the number of people happily walking into a social virtual world is enormous. Don’t confuse the wallet count with the audience.

The honest reality-check

Now the part most hype skips. That Travis Scott concert? A friend who worked on it told me there were never more than ~100 people in a single instance — it was many copies of the same space, released to users in waves over about a week. So drop the fantasy of 10,000 people in one room. If you need the feeling of a crowd, you generate it. If you want to “speak to a million people” in one event, you’ll really be speaking to one or two at a time — and that’s fine.

Be honest about quality, too. A lot of this is still glitchy: you walk in, you’re not sure how to talk to anyone, the frame rate crawls even on a powerful PC, and half the time no one’s there. I once spent half an hour in a “social” world and met no one. But notice the flip side: graphics quality matters far less than people assume. Roblox and Minecraft look blocky and have hundreds of millions of users. For most people, “good enough to inhabit” beats “photoreal.”

What actually works for a brand

Keep it yours — white-label. Brands rarely want to send their audience off to someone else’s platform. A white-label, open world lets you keep users on your own infrastructure, with portals, multiplayer, and an optional wallet — but it feels like your brand, not a platform’s.
Insist on interoperability. One object that works as a web AR file, a world item, and a smart-contract asset — no app required — is worth more than a flashy one-off. It’s the difference between an experiment and an investment.
Bridge to the physical, don’t escape it. The brief I hear most: “I have a physical product — bring it to the digital world, and if someone buys the NFT, ship them the physical one too.” People don’t want to flee reality; they want a connection to it.
Match the aesthetic to the brand. Not everyone wants Fortnite gloss. Some brands specifically want low-poly, hand-drawn, “kid’s drawing” worlds. Your platform should deliver many visual languages, not one.
Collaboration beats ownership. It pays to have others on board — an interplay between brands, artists, even architects (we’ve worked with names like MVRDV and Zaha Hadid Architects) — far more than planting a flag and saying “mine.”

And the ethics, early

Different people want very different experiences. Some won’t share their data; some won’t enter a world that doesn’t account for its CO₂. Those aren’t edge cases — they’re design requirements. The same care applies to attention and behaviour inside these worlds, which I dig into in the ethics of spatial computing. Build the limits and the consent in from day one, not after the backlash.

We’ve put these ideas to work across projects — from a virtual exhibition for the Hermitage (more in immersive museums) to building branded immersive spaces for cultural institutions. The throughline is always the same: open, interoperable, connected to the real world, and built with people rather than at them. That’s the battleground — and collaboration, not ownership, is how you win it.

For the broader shift underneath all this, see what changes when the interface is the world.