When the Lumisphere Experience was created to help people touch their imaginations to envision the future they want, we didn’t know that it might also shift consciousness and be a pathway to action. 

From last fall’s installation at Rio’s Museum of Tomorrow, a survey of visitors has yielded new insights on public imagination, agency, and belief in positive futures. Visions2030 partner Institute for the Future (IFTF) is leading the Census on the Future, a research effort to measure and amplify the Lumisphere's impact. The study found that the 11-week presentation—which drew 50,000 visits and 36,000 survey responses from participants—elicited dynamic shifts in confidence and hope while reducing despair and disengagement.

Participants were significantly more likely to report the highest levels of optimism after the experience, and significantly less likely to report none at all. Patterns observed in the initial five weeks replicated consistently across all four measures—mental flexibility, realistic hope, future power/self-efficacy, and openness to possibility—with shifts in what IFTF calls "urgent optimism" holding steady and even deepening.

The research suggests that large-scale immersive experiences like the Lumisphere can generate tangible improvements in how people relate to the future. By making urgent optimism measurable, IFTF is helping define a new category of future-readiness metrics that assess the emotional and cognitive foundations of resilience, collaboration, and long-term thinking.

Learn more about the IFTF + Visions2030 Partnership for the Lumisphere Experience and findings from the Census on the Future visitor survey HERE.