Immersive media has the potential for strong impact on users’ emotions, their sense of presence and engagement, and increasingly, users are enjoying and technology is supporting their involvement by capturing, producing, sharing and accessing information from their perspectives and experiences, over the Internet, in social media, and through video on demand services through iTV. We have been witnessing an increase in the amount of content and devices for capturing, viewing and sensing, a lot of them portable and offering tremendous opportunities for immersion, user participation and personalization. The integration of different media formats, including 3D content, panoramic displays, multiviews, as well as the possibility of delivering and accessing content through different communication vehicles, promote the development of a new participatory paradigm and enable new perceptual user experiences that provide more realistic, engaging, joyful and immersive involvement.

Immersion may be determined by sensory modalities, surround effect, and vividness through resolution, associated with the sense of presence, the user’s conscious feeling of being inside the virtual world; and by participation and social immersion in the media chain, increasing the sense of belonging. It has an impact on the users and may benefit from personalized and context-aware environments and content. Given the complexity of these emerging media environments, researchers have begun to grapple with the dynamics of contemporary media usage to face the challenges for the design and development of technology and applications that effectively support and realize this immersion potential.

Set up in the middle of a media revolution where users are expecting to take part of the action by interacting with and generating content and to experience immersive and personalized environments, the workshop goal is to bring together researchers and practitioners in this interdisciplinary and transversal emerging field, and to foster discussion of ongoing work and future directions of related topics by providing a forum for focused exchanges on new ideas, developments, and results.