Watch footage from early music festivals and what strikes you is how spartan the set-up was back then. Half a century later, audiences are spirited away to new worlds thanks to immersive festival experiences which combine theatrical backdrops, lighting and projections to produce augmented realities.
Today’s audiences crave more: multisensory environments, visual storytelling, interactive art, and emotional depth. Across the globe and particularly in the UK, festivals are transforming into immersive worlds where sound is just one part of the story.
Engaging the senses with immersive festival experiences
The shift from pure performance to full sensory engagement marks a significant evolution in festival culture. What once began as gatherings for musical appreciation have morphed into experiential playgrounds where creativity, technology, and design collide in immersive festival experiences.
From Glastonbury’s sprawling interactive zones filled with light and projections to Boomtown’s theatrical cityscapes, the UK has become a hotbed for experiential innovation. It’s something that Blackbeam has experienced, lighting up the Pier for night time audiences in the Glastonbury on Sea area and an increased interest in light trails and creating immersive experiences from festival and event organisations.
Experience economy meets festival culture
Driven by a broader cultural trend toward experiences that go beyond just ‘watching the bands’ festivals are catering to audiences who want to feel something memorable and shareable.
With social media amplifying every moment, attendees now look for experiences that are not just heard but seen, felt, and remembered. According to Eventbrite, over 78% of millennials say they prefer spending money on experiences over material things—a fact not lost on festival organisers.
UK festivals have embraced this demand for increasingly more immersive festival experiences. Boomtown, for example, offers an entire “living theatre” city with evolving narratives, hidden venues, and interactive actors.
It’s part West End, part rave, and completely immersive. Wilderness Festival blends music with art, wellness, and culinary adventure, offering everything from lake swimming to immersive theatre under the stars.
The evolution of immersive festival experiences
When Sister Sledge released club classic Lost in Music in 1979, it captured the spirit of the age – an era when disco transformed nightclubbing and atmospheric rock inspired the move to bigger and bigger venues.
Within a decade the stadium tour and large scale dance events, like the legendary orbital raves of the late 1980s, had moved the dial on music lovers’ expectations. As the events got more grandiose, lighting, lasers and big screens began to play more of a part in the overall show.
It was perhaps inevitable that the festival experience would follow this trend and it was in the 2000s that this new landscape began to be explored, through innovative festival areas such as Lost Vagueness at Glastonbury and smaller festivals with a more immersive element such as the Secret Garden party.
Technological innovation was added to this ethos and by the end of the decade, Block 9
And surrounding areas at Glastonbury were being transformed into new festivalscapes that began to resemble the backdrop of a hedonistic vision of Disneyworld. When Arcadia debuted their Spider at Boomtown in 2012, it took sensory performance to new levels.
Lighting, lasers and projections take atmosphere to new dimensions
Lighting has always been crucial in creating atmosphere, but it’s now being used in increasingly sophisticated ways. From pulsing lasers to ambient light fields that shift with time and tempo, lighting is a dynamic language that shapes emotion and space.
It’s no longer just about illuminating the stage—it’s about illuminating the entire world around it. One of the most transformative technologies shaping immersive festivals is the use of projections.
Projection bombing and projection mapping allows digital visuals to be cast onto irregular surfaces—buildings, sculptures, natural landscapes—turning them into living, breathing canvases.
A good example of working with the landscape in the UK was illustrated by the Bluedot Festival where projection mapping was used to illuminate the Lovell Telescope with psychedelic visuals and cosmic narratives, syncing space science with artistic spectacle.
Internationally, festivals like Coachella and Tomorrowland have pushed the limits of large-scale projection mapping, but UK festivals are catching up fast in both ambition and artistry.
And it’s not just the big festivals which are changing direction to accommodate this appetite for new experiences. UK festivals such as Houghton and Lost Village are lighting the way for smaller, more boutique festivals built around immersive festival experiences, where performance, sound and visual stimulation combines to change perception and craft a different world. It is inevitable that more small festivals will follo
Immersive experiences light
the way for smaller festivals
