Tech Support
Wayfinding: Spotlights > Audience Onboarding > Tech Support
As a digital theatre maker, you will need to test anything the audience interacts with to enjoy your show; you will also need to be available to help audiences with other questions as they arise. Where in-person theatres have ushers, front of house staff, house managers, and sometimes even stage managers for audience support, digital performances need a different role. Typically, having someone available as tech support helps audiences figure out how to watch the performance. Clemence Debaig told me: ‘it’s kind of like, customer service slash stage manager slash someone who understands like, How do you join in VR on this specific headset? Versus, “I can't find the entrance on the theatre.” You really need to understand all the possibilities’. Michael Deacon with Creation Theatre said: ‘We generally have a stage manager, and we also tend to have somebody in who's front of house, who is essentially just letting people in if they're coming late into the Zoom call. Making sure nobody hijacks’ the performance, as happened with some Zoom meetings that got goat bombed.
Andrew Hungerford also told me that more complex digital engagements might need more tech support along the way:
Particularly when we did the choose-your-own-path show, we discovered that … because the way that particular technology layered on top of other videos, if people had it sized improperly, they couldn't click through in certain ways, or if people were trying to do it on their phone … So, we ended up troubleshooting that quite a bit, as well. It adds an extra layer to everything you produce.
Hardware is not fully standardised, and this can cause problems if the show is not beta tested across devices. Hungerford added an anecdote about user interactions with an audio walk Know designed, which seemed simple as a concept but still had points of failure: the reviewer ‘could not figure out how to get the app to work, and I spent like 30 minutes on the phone with him, and eventually I had him just download the files and play them in order’.
Over six festivals, the OnBoardXR team developed a streamlined approach for their audiences: the shows were created in Mozilla Hubs, a webXR space, which could be interacted with using multiple devices including VR headsets, laptops, and even mobile phones. Prior to each performance, that show’s audience was given access to some of OBXR’s Discord, so they could get technical assistance as needed:
Patrons were offered four options for support in the OBXR Discord; it was also common for them to ask questions when they joined the virtual world. Brendan Bradley and Michael Morran both acted as hosts, welcoming the audience into the space (for OBXR6, it was a version of Bradley’s FutureStages); as they interacted with audience avatars, the two hosts were able to ascertain whether that audience member wanted to be directly interacted with or not, whether their technical set-up was working (microphones being muted or non-functional were common problems), or other potential issues. This also allowed Bradley and Morran to chat to the audience and create a warm, communal environment, setting a standard of engagement with performers and with each other; this creates, as Bradley told me, an ‘atrium-ed experience of good house management kind of setting the tone, setting the energy, getting to mingle while still preserving some sort of reverence for the performance space; that is the space we are going to enter, and we are going to witness story, and we're going to share and hold that space for each other as good participants’. Creating a space of welcoming, the ‘atrium’ or similar space, not only offers a place to troubleshoot technical issues or instruct the audience on how they engage, but is a different emotional experience compared to loading screens on videogames or the title credits of a film.
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