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Virtual teleportation of a theatre audience onto the stage: VR as an assistive technology

Abstract
For more than a decade, virtual reality (VR) has been employed to enrich and heighten media experiences. Despite the recognized potential and promise of VR, and ample investment, it has yet to fully transform or replace existing screen-based experiences (e.g. film or gaming). This research forms a part of a larger project to shift VR applications beyond otherwise apparent areas of screen-based media, in order to enhance audience access and propinquity to a live performance. This study is being conducted in the field of theatre, a dramatic medium in which audience are traditionally static and where an individual’s seating position determines their perceptual experience (distance, angle, lights, obstructed vs clear view). This paper introduces the broader project and its experimentation with VR as an assistive technology. The project seeks to utilize VR as a means of converting an otherwise static experience to provide collective moments of visual teleportation, onto stage, into props and on actors. VR offers a non-invasive means of introducing variance in viewer proximity or position relative to performance. This paper reports on the early development and use of a three-dimensional theatre prototyping in order to explore the technical requirements for application to a VR theatre experience.
Type
Conference Contribution
Type of thesis
Series
Citation
Srinivasan, S., & Schott, G. R. (2020). Virtual teleportation of a theatre audience onto the stage: VR as an assistive technology. In Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing (Vol. 1129 AISC, pp. 477–487). Cham, Switzerland: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39445-5_36
Date
2020
Publisher
Springer
Degree
Supervisors
Rights
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020. This is the author's accepted version. The final publication is available at Springer via dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39445-5_36