Awe

Awe is an emotional response to perceived vastness — physical, conceptual, social, or spiritual — that requires a person to update their mental models to accommodate it. It blends wonder, reverence, and sometimes fear, and is associated with reduced self-focus, increased prosocial behaviour, and a sense of meaning. In immersive media research, awe is used as a measurable experiential outcome (for example via the Awe Experience Scale, AWE-S, and its short form AWE-SF) when evaluating VR, multisensory, and cultural heritage applications. Designing for awe in accessibility contexts means ensuring the cues that evoke it — scale, atmosphere, sound, scent, narrative — reach users through more than one channel, so the experience is not gated on vision or hearing alone.