Immersive Experience
Economy

A unit economics framework for the immersive experience industry

v1.0 — March 2026

The Problem

The immersive experience industry has no shared language for measuring what it produces.

Theme parks report attendance. VR arcades count sessions. Immersive theatre tracks ticket revenue. Museums measure footfall. None of these metrics capture what the industry actually delivers: experience per unit of resource consumed.

Without a common unit of measurement, operators cannot benchmark. Investors cannot compare. Policymakers cannot regulate intelligently. The result is an industry that grows by intuition rather than by evidence.

The Immersive Experience Economy framework proposes a solution: three derived metrics, anchored to energy consumption, that make experience economics legible, comparable, and actionable.

The Framework

NPS / kWh
Experience Efficiency

Net Promoter Score per kilowatt-hour of energy consumed. Measures how much satisfaction each unit of energy produces.

€ / kWh
Commercial Efficiency

Revenue per kilowatt-hour of energy consumed. Measures how effectively energy input converts to commercial output.

m²
Scale Multiplier

Physical footprint as a scaling factor. Captures the spatial dimension that distinguishes immersive experiences from screen-based ones.

Full Framework Derivation

The Master Metrics

€ · m² / kWh
Commercial Yield

Revenue times footprint, divided by energy consumed. The single number that captures how efficiently a venue converts physical space and energy into revenue.

NPS · m² / kWh
Experience Yield

Satisfaction times footprint, divided by energy consumed. The single number that captures how efficiently a venue converts physical space and energy into memorable experience.

Together, these two master metrics provide a complete picture: one captures commercial performance, the other captures experiential performance. Both use the same denominator (kWh) and the same multiplier (m²), making them directly comparable.

The White Paper

The full derivation, diagnostic applications, and implementation guide.

Ten sections covering why energy is the right anchor unit, how each metric is derived, four diagnostic scenarios, and applications for venue operators, experience designers, investors, and policymakers.

Read the White Paper

The Author

Cederik Haverbeke

Entrepreneur. Founder of an XR Venture Studio. Managing Director of XR Valley VZW. Vice President and Treasurer of UnitedXR Europe.

The Immersive Experience Economy framework emerges from a decade of building, funding, and governing immersive experience ventures across Europe — and from the persistent frustration of having no shared metrics to evaluate them.

cederik.com →