Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) and sensing technologies are reshaping how people experience immersive environments. This study investigates how audiences perceive and emotionally respond to such environments through an AI-driven mixed-methods analysis. A dataset of 275 usergenerated YouTube videos documenting experiences with The Sphere, an AI-convergent immersive environment, totaling over 3000 min of content and 24 million cumulative views, was analyzed to extract experiential themes, dominant emotions, and their relationships with public engagement metrics. The analysis identified seven key experiential themes: Awe of the Display, Personalized Spatial Audio Experience, Full-Body Sensory Engagement, Dynamic Visual Spectacle, Joyful Human–AI Encounter, Futuristic Spatial Design Experience, and Transformative Event Environment. Sentiment analysis revealed that fear was the most dominant emotion in textual narratives (42.3%), followed by surprise, sadness, happiness, and anger, whereas video-based analysis highlighted happiness (25.8%) and sadness (24.5%) as the most salient visual emotions. This contrast suggests that linguistic expressions emphasized feelings of awe and overwhelm, while visual cues reflected affective immersion and emotional depth. Regression results showed that Awe of the Display had the strongest positive impact on engagement (views, likes, comments), while Personalized Spatial Audio Experience showed a negative effect. These findings deepen the understanding of user experience in immersive environments and demonstrate how AI-assisted multimodal analysis can reveal the dynamics between audience perception and engagement in next-generation immersive environments.OPEN ACCESS Received: 12/11/2025 Accepted: 15/12/2025 Published: 03/02/2026