Your mission is to save the marine life within the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary off the u.s. east coast. On three large screens, life forms, from whales to plankton, flash by in a montage of undersea existence. On a control panel at your seat, you are prompted to choose a balance between natural and human factors that will allow life to thrive. The wrong set of parameters will be devastating.

Welcome to the world of interactive cinema.

Immersion Studios, a Toronto-based production company, continues to lead the way in this emerging sector with several new productions in development and new ‘Immersion Reality’ theatres set to open in Montreal, Boston and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, d.c. in the coming months.

While many companies are dabbling in the arena of interactive cinema, few have taken it to the level of Immersion.

Cofounder Stacey Spiegel says the concept behind Immersion Reality is to empower audience members to interact in three unique ways: competitively, collaboratively and personally. In other words, audience members vie to get more points than each other; there is the opportunity to work with, or against, each other to initiate different elements of the show; plus audience members can go into a database to delve deeper and access background and profile information.

‘We lovingly call these things ‘govies,’ which are game-movies,’ says Spiegel, a new media artist who previously created large-scale interactive projects in Europe.

‘That’s kind of what we’re dealing with, a hybrid experience which we think extends the cinematic experience into the next generation of storytelling where you can actually play in the narrative itself.’

At the top of Immersion’s production slate is Vital Space, ‘an interactive, in-the-body experience,’ in the tradition of Innerspace and Fantastic Voyage, says Spiegel. The audience is enlisted to help discover a virus that has infected an astronaut. To do so, viewers follow ‘nanobots’ through the infected space explorer’s internal systems right down to her sub-cellular dna.

Vital Space is being created with 380 possible scenarios which the audience can determine.

‘The storylines themselves are multi-path, but it’s not just pick your own ending,’ Spiegel says. ‘There’s quite an opportunity to segment, break away, come back to the storyline, go off on a different direction and to a different subset.’

Of course, the only economical way to create so many twists in the storyline is to employ plentiful animation.

For Vital Space, Immersion’s full-time staff of 3D animators, using 3D Studio max software, studiously recreated the human internal structures to near perfection.

Even the live-action portions are composited into a cg environment. ‘That cuts down tremendously on the costs of production,’ Spiegel says. ‘It also allows us to do the multi-path in a much more convincing fashion.’

Aside from the Dolby Digital sound generation and mixing – usually contracted to Masters Workshop out of Toronto – Immersion handles every aspect of its productions, Spiegel says.

Immersion, which Spiegel founded with partner Rodney Hoinkes in 1997, works its magic out of the historic triple-domed Music Building on the grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition.

It was there, during the 1997 cne, that the studio launched its first production, a virtual reality entertainment installation called My Canada. The production combined videoclips, satellite images, photography, text, animation, sound, Web links, models and textures.

The early system was based on Silicon Graphics’ Onyx2 Infinite Reality hardware coupled with high-definition projectors.

Immersion has since developed a pc-based exhibition technology based on proprietary software written by Hoinkes called Poetic Dimension, which synchronizes multiple streams of video and audio and coordinates it with the interactive elements.

Today, each audience member is provided an interactive console which can access images, digital video, sound and links to the Web.

Immersion Reality theatres consist of three screens laid out in a concave setup fired by three advanced digital projectors manufactured by Imax-owned Digital Projections.

The images on the screen are hd resolution, which, Spiegel says, combined with the fact that Poetic Dimensions can be downstreamed for broadband, means Immersion Reality is ready-made for the small screen.

He envisions the day in the not too distant future where an Immersion audience can be at home competing against one another across a network.

Spiegel says there is also a good synergy between imax productions and Immersion Reality because the technology is ready-made for the giant screen as well.

But for now the studio is looking at finding its way into museums and multiplexes across North America. Later this year, Vital Space will premier at the Interactive Science Museum in Montreal before moving on to the Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian.

The studio also just finished its first live-action film, titled Unforgettable Boston. Produced for the city of Boston, the story follows a couple about to be married when the man is bonked on the head by a baseball at Fenway Park. The audience then helps lead the couple as they tool around the city trying to jar his memory before the walk down the aisle.

The typical Immersion Reality film can cost up to us$1 million to produce and runs less than 20 minutes, much like a motion-ride attraction, but Spiegel believes the content can be expanded to 40 minutes and perhaps one day to feature-length.

But that depends on the success of creating a distribution network for the productions through the expansion of Immersion Reality theatres.

Spiegel hopes to see nine theatres, each set up to accommodate 60 to 100 audience members, to open in the next two years.

Spiegel says a turnkey theatre runs in the us$1-million range.

New Cinema is pushing to open theatres with a purely entertainment-driven focus in shopping malls and multiplexes, he adds.

To that end, Immersion Studios has got the ball rolling with a short interactive film and accompanying theatre package, which it will be shopping around ShowWest in Las Vegas in March.