Onboarding, consent, and audience trust

The arrival sequence, the branding, the orientation film, the guided tour vehicles. This is onboarding in its purest form. The park reassures its guests that they are safe, looked after, and part of a carefully designed experience.

Experience design relies on the same mechanism. Audiences need to know what kind of experience they are entering, how they are expected to behave, and what level of risk or participation is involved. Without this, surprise becomes anxiety rather than engagement.

Jurassic Park understands that trust must be built before it can be broken.

Perspective over proximity

A common misconception in immersive work is that closeness equals immersion. Jurassic Park proves the opposite. The audience is rarely placed in direct danger. Instead, tension is created through perspective. Watching from inside the car, behind glass, under the fence.

The film controls audience position with precision. This is exactly how immersive experiences maintain emotional intensity without overwhelming participants. Immersion is about relationship to events, not physical distance from them.

Systems, control, and meaningful failure

The science in Jurassic Park is famously flawed, yet the film remains emotionally convincing. That is because its characters behave like people and its consequences feel earned.

Immersive experiences do not need realism. They need emotional logic. Audiences will accept extraordinary premises if the world responds to them honestly and consistently.

Responsibility in world building

At its heart, Jurassic Park is a cautionary tale about creation without accountability. The ability to build something spectacular does not absolve the creator of responsibility for its impact.

This is a vital lesson for immersive practitioners. Immersion amplifies emotion, vulnerability, and trust. With that comes a duty of care. Designing worlds is not just a creative act, it is an ethical one.

Why this matters for immersive Experience Design

Jurassic Park matters because it is not just a blueprint for brilliant world building, it is also a quietly terrifying dystopia for the future of live experiences and attractions if we get complacent.

Strip away the dinosaurs and you are left with something uncomfortably familiar. A premium attraction driven by scale, automation, branding, efficiency, and spectacle. Guests are processed, reassured, and managed. Human complexity is treated as an inconvenience. Risk is assumed to be solvable by systems. Sound familiar? If not, spend five minutes in a badly designed immersive experience where no one quite knows what is allowed, where the exit is, or who is actually in charge.

Jurassic Park shows us what happens when experience design prioritises control over care, throughput over trust, and innovation over responsibility. It is the logical end point of the thinking that bigger, faster, smarter, more immersive is always better. The joke, of course, is that this is exactly how people get eaten by raptors.

For immersive creators, this is the real takeaway. World building is not neutral. Immersion magnifies everything, emotion, fear, delight, confusion, vulnerability. The more convincing the world, the greater the responsibility of the people who build it. Consent, clarity, pacing, agency, and safe failure are not nice extras. They are the difference between magic and meltdown.

This is where thoughtful immersive design matters. Not just how impressive something looks, but how it behaves under pressure. What happens when things go wrong. How audiences are supported, not managed. How trust is earned, not assumed.

At Bristol based Immersive Ideas Experience Agency, this is exactly where we focus our work. We design experiences that respect audiences, honour story, and understand the emotional mechanics of participation. We build worlds that feel alive because they are coherent, human, and accountable. Not theme parks with better tech, but experiences with purpose, care, and consequence baked in from the start.

Jurassic Park endures because it understood something the industry still occasionally forgets. Just because you can build it, does not mean you should build it that way.

And if the future of live experiences ever starts to feel a bit too much like a glossy orientation film promising everything is completely safe, while the fences quietly hum in the background, that is probably the moment to pause, step back, and rethink the design.