Augmented Theatre Concept

Our concept for an augmented theater performance shows the narrative possibilities that a live performance in front of a 360° camera can offer to an audience with VR headsets.
In particular, we want to explore what narrative tools this new medium can offer and how they can be integrated into classical theater. Since this is essentially a live video production in a theater setting, a whole range of „video effects“ can be used. However, rather than focusing on making the technology possible, we want to explore what effect this concept might have on the audience and how storytelling needs to adapt to this medium.

To show that the technical side is actually not a big problem, our team member Jan made a small prototype in his home office along with a short explainer video. The setup took only a few hours and it already runs live on a home workstation. Even streaming it live into a vr headset works quite well already.

This is of course only meant to demonstrate how the technology can work and what narrative possibilities it could offer. It clearly does not represent any form of style that we are generally striving for and does intentionally not focus on anything regarding the narrative content! It is purly meant to help you understand the technology that is the basis of our reasearch into augmented theatre.
Try to imagine how this might be used in a performance with a proper stage set and how it would feel to the audience.



This is a 360 video, and Youtube should allow you to view it as such. If you can’t look around the video, try opening it with the Youtube mobile app on your phone or tablet!