Immersive experiences are nothing new. Commemorating a battle that took place half a millennium ago, the seven panels that comprise the Pavia Tapestries — each of which is 13 feet high; taken together, the tapestries are nearly 200 feet long — have a kind of endlessness about them. Thousands of figures populate the tapestries (I dare you to find any two that are alike) and all are engaged, you might say, immersed, in survival.

The battle, in the imagination of the combatants, might have been a contest between knights in shining armor, a stately, chivalric, sort of thing, the stuff of epic poems, but the tapestries reveal that on the day a less medieval, more modern concept of conflict was at work — war is hell.