When Augmented and Virtual Reality Hit the Theater

Back in 1994, Julie Martin, a theater director from Australia, created a stage performance called Dancing in Cyberspace. The performance featured dancers and acrobats engaging with virtual objects of human size. Australia Council for the Arts supported the idea and its implementation, and this is how the first augmented-reality-powered theater performance saw the light.

Today, 25 years later, augmented and virtual reality application in art is no longer a novelty. In the article embracing the influence of AR on the visual art, AR developers from Iflexion recall the brightest examples of the symbiosis of AR and art. And theaters definitely don’t lag behind, while augmented reality developers help theaters create various immersive and impressive experiences for their audiences in a number of unexpected ways. AR and VR change the traditional actor-space–audience paradigm, making it more like an audience-space relationship. The marriage of AR/VR technology and art allows spectators to become part of the plot, while actors and play producers are usually limited only by their own imagination. Here are some examples of how technology changes the theater, a most conservative art form.

Making the theater all-pervasive

59.production is a London-based creative studio that makes the theater go beyond the traditional wooden stage. In collaboration with the National Theatre, the company created one of the most prominent examples of VR-empowered performances. Called Fabulous wonder.land, it was inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass books and Rufus Norris’s musical Wonder.land. To experience the fantastic world of the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter, the audience needs to wear Oculus Rift headsets. This VR system helps the spectators, or rather participants, repeat Alice’s adventure by falling down the rabbit hole and entering the strange world, where nothing really makes sense.

My Name is Peter Stillman is another 59.production’s VR-powered theater experience. The product accompanies the show City of Glass, so the spectators can experience it before and after the main show while entering a VR booth and employing an Oculus Rift VR headset.

Another example of AR reinterpretation of classics is the product of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Intel. The Tempest, one of the most magical plays of William Shakespeare, has undergone significant transformations. While implementing AR in this iconic classical play, Gregory Doran, the artistic director, set himself and the team a goal to absolutize the magical atmosphere created by Shakespeare back in the early 1600s. For example, Ariel, a spirit in the play, is entirely digital. The new-generation Ariel isn’t a recording, but a live performance, executed by an actor Mark Quartley. His costume contains sensors that read out his facial expressions and movements. The real-time data from the sensors powers the digital Ariel, who has about 330 body joints, like in an average human body. The avatar is then projected live on the stage.

While today’s children have shorter attention spans, some technology companies and theaters cater specifically to this part of the target audience. Israel-based ARShow startup and The Gesher Theater have created the AR-empowered version of Gulliver. Every seat is equipped with a Merge headset and a pre-configured smartphone that bring to life fantastic AR elements such as a giant cat or a swarm of bees circling right above the audience’ heads.

When the theater makes its way out of four walls

With the improvement of headsets, each of us can live through a theater experience wherever we can carry the VR glasses and a smartphone. Thus, the streets and our own houses become the theater stage, and the audience turns into full-fledged participants of a performance that doesn’t need actors anymore.

A good example is a Scotland-based Dragon Matrix outdoor theater that has already launched three shows, DragonQuest in 2015, Dragon Matrix in 2015, and Dragons of Drummohr in 2017. Using their smartphones with a pre-installed application, the participants explore a wooded area, reveal magical creatures that help in finding dragon artifacts, and do their best to avoid trolls. Having a lot in common with the quest genre, such type of theater has a predetermined plot but still allows participants to fully submerge into the digital dream world and make their own decisions.

CoLab is another theater that urges the audience to stop turning off their phones during a performance but to make them part of it. Their Fifth Column is a fully-fledged spy thriller with the plot unfolding in the city. The spectators become the main characters that have to run through the streets of London while trying to escape from the bad guys and revealing unexpected plot twists. For scouring the streets of London and participating in the performance, the audience have to install a special mobile app that allows watching plot-related videos.

Making theater more convenient

When turning to the problem of understanding actors’ speech in a theater, it is AR again that comes in handy. As of today, the technology has become the best solution for the international audience and hearing-impaired as it doesn’t divert from the actions on the stage and provides timely translation and closed caption.

Britain’s National Theatre delivers real-time subtitling by deploying Epson’s smart glasses, whose lenses provide text that overlays the real world but doesn’t completely block it. The user has an opportunity to choose the color, size, and location of the Wi-Fi-transmitted subtitles to make it comfortable. Today smart glasses are available for any performance staged in the National Theatre if timely booked.

Making the hard doable

All of the described examples of AR and VR implementation in the theater illustrate the potential of this marriage. We observe the transformation of one of the most conservative art forms, while it gradually appears under new technology-driven guises.

By giving the audience the opportunity to become performance participants and the directors to become all-mighty creators, the theater of today goes beyond the reality boundaries and makes the impossible pretty possible. Let’s hope that it is only the beginning of the technology-empowered Odyssey of the theater.