I found this interesting article on the USC School of Engineering ‘illumin’ (‘A Review of Engineering in Everyday Life’) website. It is, happily enough, talking about Immersion in Video Games. He takes an interesting slant to determining immersion in games – namely the Turing Test. He says “if a system can conjure up behaviors that mimic real life, has it finally passed Turing’s Test?” And he says emergent systems are the way to get there.
http://illumin.usc.edu/article.php?articleID=103&page=1
To see the definition of immersion from an Engineering student’s perspective, or just anyone who doesn’t say VR is the way to get there, is interesting.