"The Playground" is an interactive theatrical experience by theater director Jesper Pedersen that uses auditory augmented reality to immerse and engage participants in a dystopian playground soundscape. The current state of this genre of theater seems rather unique to users, but quantitative and qualitative data provided by this project establish a demand for more experiences like it. The research in this study aims to establish a format from which these experiences can be developed, as well as important aspects to enhance the experiences’ level of immersion and engagement. Through the study, an experience was created as a proof-of-concept, which only focused on a single participant’s perception of the experience. In future research, it would be important to also include an audience in the experience and examine how it also can be immersive and engaging for them as well. This suggests that the use of auditory cues should focus on soundscapes and spatialized audio to emphasize the experience, but that the experience also needs to have visual representations of the environment that synergize with the audio to enhance the story and narrative. The combination of both audio and visuals is essential for the experience
to be both immersive and engaging for the participants. It is worth mentioning that the results showed that most participants in the summative test agreed that it was a problem knowing they were part of an experiment. This decreased the overall immersion of the experience. The findings will be useful for future research in this field and contribute to the development of more unique and engaging theatrical experiences.