About the CFIA

The Center for Immersive Arts is a project by Laura E. Hall dedicated to preserving, exploring and educating about the history of immersive arts.

The CFIA began with a simple idea: to create a wiki dedicated to immersive topics. While researching for this wiki, Laura realized that there was a great need to preserve materials, websites, documentation and other resources relating to the origins of immersive entertainment, especially work created within the last 20-30 years. During this time, many web pages, forums, and social media sites have completely disappeared, taking a lot of important historical info with them.

The CFIA is a project to capture and preserve these resources before they disappear forever, to explore these materials, and to share them to as an educational resource for creators, practitioners, students, researchers and participants in the wonderful world of immersive art and entertainment.

Want to support this work and help preserve the history of immersive art and entertainment? Join the Patreon now!

About Laura

Laura was a dedicated player and forum moderator of several alternate reality games (ARGs) including Perplex City, which ran from 2004-2007. So dedicated, in fact, that even after the game ended, she pursued one of the game’s unsolved puzzles, “Billion to One”, for 15 years, until it was solved in 2021.

After moving to Portland, Oregon, Laura and a group of friends opened one of the first escape room games in the United States, the award-winning Spark of Resistance, and since she’s designed puzzle games, escape rooms, and treasure hunts all around the world.

In 2021, she wrote Planning Your Escape (Simon & Schuster), a book about the history of immersive entertainment and a toolkit for new escape room players.

Today, Laura is working to explore and educate people about the history of immersive art and entertainment through the Immersipedia and CFIA projects and archives.