From Viewers to Inhabitants: The New Dimension of Media

Introduction: When the frame dissolves

For decades, traditional media has been something we looked at – framed, flattened and admired through glass. Familiar. Comfortable. Easy to measure. But that’s changing. A quiet revolution is underway: the frame is dissolving as three dimensions replace two and screens give way to spaces.

Meanwhile, audience appetites are shifting too – from passive viewers who watch content to active inhabitants who experience it. Across sports, entertainment, travel and brand storytelling, experiences are being designed not just to be seen but entered, whether they appear on a headset, a phone, a browser, or a city street. Fans can stand courtside in augmented reality, explore 3D recreations of live data, or feel a movie spill into their living room. The line between viewer and participant – between media and environment – is blurring fast.

This isn’t simply a technological shift; it’s a psychological one – and it’s already changing how people expect to experience media. As presence becomes the new currency of engagement, brands and media owners need to start measuring something different: not who saw it, but who felt they were there.

The Age of Presence

Presence is quietly becoming a new measure of media. You can see it in how people talk about experiences now. Less about what they watched, more about where they were. It’s no longer enough to earn a glance, the goal is to create a sense of ‘being there’.

Devices like Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3 are catalysts for this shift, but they’re not the centre of it. Spatial behaviours are showing up across mobile, web, and out-of-home too, signalling a broader appetite for experiences that blend the virtual and the physical.

Younger audiences, in particular, are primed for this shift. “43% of gen Z already say they don’t see a difference between the virtual and the physical – it’s all real to them,” while “67% say they like the idea of escaping to a different reality using technology,” according to VML’s The Future 100 report for 2025. Immersion is no longer an exception. It’s an expectation.

In the age of presence, the most effective media won’t just reach audiences. It will situate them, turning every interaction into a lived experience they inhabit.

The Spatial Shift

“At its heart, spatial computing brings the digital world closer to lived reality.” And across the media landscape, forward-thinking brands are already experimenting with ways to not just capture attention, but situate it.

For its League Pass holders, the NBA created a tabletop-scale experience that projects live games into the user’s space using 3D player-tracking data. Beyond the novelty of a new device, this points to a larger shift: using real-time data to build inhabitable media formats. Proximity drives emotional impact; when fans feel closer to the action, memory and loyalty rise with it.

Baseball is exploring similar territory. MLB’s Gameday 3D experience scales spatial content to mobile, offering real-time 3D action from any angle and giving fans new ways to relive highlights. It shows that spatial thinking isn’t limited to premium hardware – it can translate to mass-reach platforms, forcing brands to consider continuity across dimensions: how does a campaign behave when it’s not just a flat story, but a world?

​Blumhouse Enhanced Cinema brings films like ‘M3GAN’ and ‘The Black Phone’ into the viewer’s living room using ambient light, sound and environmental effects. Here, the device matters less than the principle: the room becomes the screen. The emotional memory of being inside the narrative far outlasts a standard viewing.

Meanwhile, Delta’s new travel platform blends web, spatial content, Apple Vision Pro and Roblox into a single ecosystem. Instead of showing destinations, Delta stages them, letting would-be travellers experience places like a local from home. This marks a shift from broadcast to embodiment.

Even out-of-home is breaking the plane. Meta’s Thrillboards disguised portals as standard printed billboards, inviting passers-by to step inside and be transported into worlds like ‘Ghostbusters’ and ‘The Walking Dead’. It’s proof that spatial media is not platform-bound. Even the most traditional formats are rethinking the frame.

Taken together, these examples point to a single trajectory: from watching to inhabiting. Media is no longer confined to the rectangle; it’s spilling into our rooms, our streets, our senses. And as it does, it’s teaching audiences to expect not just content that moves, but content that moves through them.

Designing for Inhabitancy

Presence is a result of immersion, and immersion isn’t a format. It’s a feeling. One that can be intentionally designed. As audiences become inhabitants, media stops being a message and starts being a place.

For creatives, this means designing spatial first, treating three dimensions as the foundation rather than the flourish, regardless of where the work ultimately lives: headset, mobile, web or the physical environment. Composition, motion, sound and narrative must account for perspective, proximity and how people physically move through an idea. The goal isn’t just to make content feel alive, but to make it livable.

For agencies, it means planning not just for reach, but for resonance across dimensions – understanding how a campaign behaves when someone steps inside it, and how the 2D, 3D and physical expressions reinforce one another.

For brands, immersion becomes a powerful loyalty strategy. A well-designed spatial experience doesn’t just tell a story; it lets people live one. It builds sensory memory, something an audience can return to long after impressions fade.

And for media owners, presence introduces a new performance lens. It’s not hard to imagine presence becoming a formal KPI, even if the industry hasn’t quite figured out how to measure it yet, defined not by how long someone stays, but by how deeply they feel connected. Engagement may soon be evaluated through moments of immersion: the point at which someone crosses the threshold from observing into belonging.

The opportunity is clear: as media turns spatial, it has the potential to feel more human. From passive consumption to embodied experience, from screens that speak at us to environments that include us.

The Lived Future of Media

In the end, this is the quiet transformation reshaping our industry: viewers becoming inhabitants. As content takes up space in our lives – and we, in turn, step inside it – the role of media is shifting from what we look at to where we are. The question for brands now isn’t just how to break through the noise, but how to build somewhere worth being.

Shelley Adamson is a creative director who has worked with the likes of UNIT9, Nexus Studios and Thinkingbox