Stories have always kept their audiences at a distance. This course ends that. What if the story knew you were there? Immersive Storytelling explores the future of narrative in a world where physical, virtual, and algorithmic realities increasingly intersect. As media moves beyond the frame of the screen, storytelling shifts from observation to participation. Immersive narratives invite audiences to cross narrative thresholds - to step inside stories, navigate worlds, and experience meaning through presence, interaction, and embodied engagement. Worldbuilding is at the heart of this course: the creation of narrative environments and living story systems with their own internal logic, worlds that participants can inhabit, navigate, and influence. Drawing from theatre, film, interactive media, installation art, performance, architecture, fashion, and emerging technologies, students investigate how stories unfold across environments rather than linear timelines, and how space, interaction, image, and sonic storytelling combine to produce experiences where the boundary between narrative and world dissolves. Working across spatial XR worlds, augmented reality embedded in the city, participatory installations, and performance as interface, students develop a conceptual and creative language for designing immersive narrative systems shaped by perception, agency, embodiment, and world logic. Rather than mastering a single tool, students become spatial narrative designers - equipped to imagine and build experiences that could not exist without the people inside them. The course also confronts artificial intelligence not as a technology to celebrate or dismiss, but as a force reshaping the fundamental conditions of narrative: who authors a story, what agency a participant holds, and whether a story can exist without a human hand behind it. These are not abstract questions. What happens to authorship when a story cannot begin without its audience? What worlds become possible when experience itself becomes the medium? What stories will you choose to tell - and who might be transformed by entering them? Students must register for both the lecture and discussion section of this course. [This ULEC is in category 3, Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Arts & Humanities.]

Immersive Storytelling explores the practice and future of narrative at a moment when physical, virtual, and algorithmic worlds are increasingly intertwined and actively shape one another. As media moves beyond the frame of the screen, storytelling is no longer confined to spectatorship; immersive narratives invite participants to step inside a story, act within it, and experience meaning through interaction. This course examines how immersive experiences are conceived, designed, and encountered as new narrative forms emerge at the intersection of technology, culture, and imagination. Drawing from theatre, film, interactive media, installation art, performance, fashion, and emerging technologies, students will explore how stories unfold across space, time, and participation. Rather than focusing on a single platform or medium, the course emphasizes immersive storytelling as a design practice shaped by human presence, agency and perception. Students may work across a range of forms including spatial XR experiences, participatory installations, AI mediated narrative encounters, location based storytelling, performance as interface, and hybrid physical and digital works while developing a shared language for immersive narrative design. Set against a converging media landscape transformed by immersive technologies and artificial intelligence, this course asks how storytelling evolves when perception, presence, and participation become central to narrative experience. Through experimentation, students are challenged to imagine what storytelling can become when narratives are no longer simply viewed from a distance, but encountered, inhabited, and shaped through experience. The course invites students to create stories that are not confined to screens, but unfold around us, respond to human action, and leave lasting impressions through lived experience. As we look toward the horizon, what will storytelling, the oldest and most human of arts, become? What stories will you create? Students must register for both the lecture and discussion section of this course. [This ULEC is in category 3, Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Arts & Humanities.]