Batter up!
Unintended consequences are the best consequences.
How do you get someone to swing at a ball they cannot touch, in a game they are not playing, after you have specifically told them it makes no difference?
Apparently, you just make it real enough.
When I was young I had the measles. I was confined to my room for a week with nothing but books. No phone, no Netflix, no television of any kind. Yes, I am aware of what that implies about my age. By the end of it I had been a cowboy, a detective, a soldier, and an astronaut. I had also learned to peel grapes with my teeth. Demos available on request.
One of those books stayed with me. A story about soldiers, about belonging, about the weight of other people depending on you. I didn't have the words for it. I just knew it felt true.
That was the pattern. Different stories, same signal. Not the violence, not the setting. The code. Loyalty mattered. Rules mattered. Belonging came with weight. I was too young for at least some of those books. Luckily I was in my room and my parents did not seem to care.
Researchers call it narrative transportation. When a story is complete enough, the brain stops treating it as fiction and starts treating it as experience. You are not reading about the soldier. You are the soldier. The critical mind steps aside. The rest of you goes to work. I know more about this than I should, given that I am currently not finishing a book.
The same mechanism that put me in a foxhole also put every person who put on a HoloLens at Comerica Park inside a Major League at-bat. Which is where we get to the swing.
At Comerica Park, in partnership with Janna Matherly and the team at Bully! Entertainment, we put a HoloLens 2 on people and stood them at home plate. A pitcher on the mound. A real stadium around them. A fastball coming in at something approximating 100 miles per hour. We told everyone, very clearly, that swinging made no difference. The experience was designed to be watched. There was no bat.
Every single person swung anyway.
I could not see what they were seeing, but I could see the smile. And what I imagined, watching each of them, was that they were not standing in Detroit at a corporate event but somewhere that mattered completely — bases loaded, two outs, the whole thing riding on this pitch. Nobody instructed them to feel that. The experience did.
There is a version of this story where we talk about the technology. The HoloLens 2, the volumetric capture, the physics. It is all impressive. It is also not the point. The point is what happened before anyone had time to think about it. The question "is this real" never showed up. The experience answered it first.
This is the difference between a demonstration and an experience. A demonstration tells you what something does. An experience makes you feel what it means. What you feel, you remember. What you remember, you tell people about. What you tell people about, you buy.
Pine and Gilmore wrote about this in 1998. Experiences are personal. They exist in the mind of the person having them. The memory becomes the product. Nobody at that event remembers the spec sheet. They remember the swing. Most brands are still making spec sheets. What people experienced was the feeling of being in a moment that mattered so completely that they forgot they were standing in front of a crowd, swinging at nothing with no bat in their hands. That is what a story does. The technology just made it possible.
Most teams start with the product and try to add a story. It is backwards. Start with the moment. Build the feeling. Then earn the right to explain what made it possible.
Nobody remembers the explanation. They remember the swing.
If this resonated, Pine and Gilmore's original Harvard Business Review article — Welcome to the Experience Economy, 1998 — is worth your time. Their book of the same name goes deeper. For the cognitive science underneath the swing, look up narrative transportation theory. Green and Brock's foundational paper from 2000 is where it starts.