One of my most immersive experiences was set in a forest. During the day, the clear blue sky with big white clouds floating by, pine trees stretching, orange needles covering the ground with a smell of sap. On the ground a man is dying, but preparing for his last action, an ambush to cover the escape of his dear friends, combatants of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Man thinks a lot about death and eternity and everything he couldn’t do, the horror of finitude. He finished the book and tossed it across the room. The experience was too real for me.

Read a novel, like Ernest Hemingway’s. For whom the Bell TollsIt is an immersive experience. I never thought that I was actually Robert Jordan, that I was actually speaking Spanish among Republican guerrillas, nor did I feel exactly what he felt when a bridge was blown up, or a tank shell exploded under my horse. But I still know this world, I know what it looks like, what it smells like, what it feels like. I know a lot of the characters better than the people I’ve met in person, I know the geography of the world, I know what does and doesn’t matter to each one of them. So even if I don’t inhabit Robert Jordan’s body, I know what it feels like to be him. I know the knowledge of him and I think the thoughts of him.

Different mediums excel at different experiences, and VR and books should never try to replace each other. But there’s a lot this new medium can learn from the older ones, and hopefully steer it away from a few key mistakes. Much of the excitement for virtual reality comes from the promise of immersion, feeling like you’re actually there in an experience. VR has the highest visual fidelity of a real physical environment ever experienced and allows for realistic head and body movements. But even with directly photographed content and big budgets, VR content hasn’t captivated people like the great works of other media. VR experiences are usually neat: short and engaging, but not particularly memorable. Those initial minutes are incredible, they quickly immerse you, but the effect and its novelty wears off after a short time. By contrast, a book can be extremely difficult to start and dive into, but after 400 pages from an expert author, the dive can be just as deep, if not deeper. VR should be able to do much more than this, but so far it hasn’t.

Books, movies, games, and all other media generally become more immersive the more time you spend with them. As you get to know the world better and come to terms with it, the thoughts of the characters become your own. Usually such dives break only when something goes wrong, when the creator makes some key mistake that ruins the suspension of disbelief and forces the audience to think about the media rather than within it. A huge plot hole, broken boss fight, or poorly written dialogue takes the user out of the immersion. But with VR, people still don’t dig deep enough for this to be a real problem.

What is missing from virtual reality? It’s got amazing visuals, issues with motion comfort are improving, sound is improving, there’s experimentation with haptics, but none of these improvements seem to be getting VR any closer to enabling true immersion. The chains of persuasion that help us feel that a place is real still seem to be missing some crucial link. This is because the key ingredient that makes physical and virtual experiences real is meaning.

If I’m in a family room, it’s not the sights or sounds that make it feel real, but what I can do in it. I know where my chair is; I reach for my glass, knowing its exact weight and shape as I pick it up, knowing that it contains the water I got from the sink behind me. This background knowledge is what immerses me, not the direct perception of these objects. Meaning is how other media work with immersion. The books are full of meaning, and the more time you spend immersed, the more real the characters, locations, and logic of the world become in a way that is deeper than the senses.

Video games have deeply internalized this lesson. When computers were still simple and slow, games could simulate action much better than they could simulate images, so game designers focused on creating worlds filled with meaningful action. The text adventures were inspired by the descriptive power of books, but allowed for interaction and exploration. Because they require reading, it takes time and dedication to immerse yourself in such a low-res experience, but it can be very rewarding. Once games were able to simulate 3D graphics and movement, developers pioneered the design of kinesthetic experiences, enabling complex movement and environments. Many of the best virtual reality experiences to date are works like Half Life: Alyx Y Resident Evil 4that fully borrow the meaning structures of video games but deepen the experience with virtual reality features.

When I control Mario, I’m immersed. It doesn’t matter that it’s on a small screen separate from my face, that the graphics are locked, that the sound isn’t spatial, or that I control it by pressing buttons, because I’ve learned this world and what I can do in it. . Just as I don’t think to “reach out” when I reach for a glass, I never think to “press A” but only to “jump”, “jump”, “triple jump”, move nimbly through this world. Kinesthetic experiences are very absorbing and require great concentration, which in turn facilitates greater immersion in the world.

Simulating actions simply is also more realistic for the experience of meaning than simulating them in detail. If you asked me to hit instead of pressing a button for a game of Street Fighter, it would hit bad. My form would be completely wrong, I would not be able to extend properly, my muscles would not be used to the movement. I would have to be thinking every moment about the unknown act of hitting and what exactly I am doing right and wrong. But for a martial arts master like Ryu, hitting is second nature, his body and mind are trained to render him unconscious. I wouldn’t think “extend arm”, but rather “punch”, which is also what I think when I press the button on my controller. Accurately simulating an action can be a valuable design tool, but an action that fails even a tenth of the time destroys immersion in a way that an abstracted button press would not. Immersion should give you the feeling of being in a world, and no world will feel right without constant monitoring of your actions.

This careful attention to the meaning of actions should extend to the meaning of the environment as well. If there is nothing to do in a world, then it doesn’t feel real, just a series of unrelated images. Good experience design teaches a user how to navigate a space based on goals and actions. Play an RPG like Dark souls, I know there’s a shortcut under a shrine unlocked with a key I got from an enemy, but getting there means I’ll have to face several other enemies. Every decision requires strategy and thought, but I’m thinking entirely within the world itself: my thoughts are the same as the character’s. I know where I am and what I am doing. Even if it seems to an outsider that I am just pressing buttons, because I am immersed, my sword strikes have meaning, advancing towards the goals of this fictional world I inhabit.

Virtual reality represents a huge advance in media technology, which will undoubtedly provide the best visual, auditory and haptic experiences. But more fundamental to immersion is meaning within a world, meaning of movement, navigation, and aim. To create the best immersion, VR must be built on a carefully designed foundation of meaningful interaction that guides the player in making the virtual world their own.

Ethan Edwards is a creative technologist at EY.