Weird AR Prototype: THEATRICAL REALITY

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Let me share with you a prototype I realised not even a month ago in collaboration with the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment and Central Saint Martins here in London UK.

Theatrical Reality
A magic mirror to unchain theatrical barriers, creating new streams for poetry to beguile audiences.

Theatrical Reality aims to enhance the audience's experience of live performance through a pioneering innovation in production not seen in the concert hall before: we want to bring the concert hall to life for a new generation. This enhancement will be delivered through digital technology and closed networks to mobiles and tablets and will allow the audience to enjoy an additional AR layer of creative content that responds in real-time to live events on stage. Theatrical Reality, therefore, intends to achieve three things:

1. enrich the artistic experience in a completely new dimension,
2. have a sector-relevant legacy and
3. have the potential to evolve in a financially sustainable manner.

Intended Audience
Classical music has a resilient audience but it is not universally satisfied by the concert hall experience which tends to attract the same cohort season-by-season with minor demographic fluctuation. We believe that our Theatrical Reality can disrupt preconceived notions of musical appreciation, attract unaccustomed concert goers (different ethnic groups, younger audiences, families) to an immersive adventure in the concert hall itself and crucially provide a technology where music could be appreciated in a 'concert hall' of one's own choice.

Creator's Statement
The concert hall is in desperate need of revitalisation. Audiences are ageing and diminishing, and the fine buildings that were once developed to facilitate appreciation are becoming obstacles to access, too often failing to relate to the younger or diverse audience. We believe that AR has the potential to transform the entire concert experience, to bring the great adventure of music to life and make it compelling to a more diverse audience. We want Theatrical Reality to be a tool for both expression and engagement: a production framework that can diversify what we do and who we do it for.

Technical Summary
The prototype builds on top of a mixed solution of hardware and software. We use Pozyx trackers and lighthouses to track live dancers and to gather 3D data to recreate the stage and the dancer’s motion within a digital environment. Meanwhile, a fixed camera streams in UNITY a live feed, we composite, on the fly, digital interactive assets with the dancer. We are then able to distribute the theatrical reality (TR) to mobile devices within a small amount of latency.

Team
Crispin Woodhead - OAE's Chief Executive
Yates Buckley - UNIT9 Technical Director
Alberto Venditti - Interactive Director
Riess Philips - Unity Developer
Tomaso Cariboni - Senior Producer

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