👾Virtual Reality Theatre
Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Virtual Reality Theatre
Virtual Reality Theatre perhaps is, for many theatre makers, simpler to understand compared to Cinematic or Televisual Theatre as current VR experiences allow for both temporally live shows and a greater sense of physical embodiment in a shared space: ‘this type of interaction may still be considered “live” performance as it occurs in real time between real people, but the actual location of interactive connection is within a virtual environment’, write . Virtual reality technology aims to emulate the audiovisual sensory immersion that is part of everyday physical existence but within a headset, although many VR experiences are also available on computer or smartphone so they are accessible more users. , in a book theorising how VR technologies are rapidly changing our culture, the simplest definition of VR is: ‘(1) an artificial environment that’s (2) immersive enough (3) to convince you that you’re actually inside it’. Brendan Bradley considered that the embodiment available through VR integrates our desire for social interaction: ‘[tech companies are] looking for the killer app that's going to make VR suddenly marketable to the masses, and I think that the social liveness, the connection of these embodied 3-D mediums is extraordinary’. Embodiment within a virtual space, a sense of being ‘actually inside it’, is exactly what theatre makers do.
Immersion is an experience theatre has endeavoured to achieve for centuries. In fact, the stage was termed a virtual environment long before digital technology stole the name. Surrealist theatre pioneer while considering the mystical, ‘alchemical’ symbolism possible within the theatre space: ‘this eternal reference to the fundamental principles and objects in theatre, found in almost all alchemist texts, ought to be understood as a feeling … of the similarity there is between the level on which characters, objects, portrayals and in a general way everything which makes up theatre’s virtual reality develops’. In this dramaturgy, the audience and performers both know that there is the mundane, non-mystical world around them which produces the people and objects they see onstage, and simultaneously the ‘alchemy’ that occurs when lights, sound, set, costumes, and performers gather together, melding their symbolism to create the world of the play – and this symbolism can then be interpreted by the audience as another world metaphysically, temporally, and physically co-present with them for the duration of the evening’s entertainment.
After Artaud, virtual reality was adopted by technology pioneers and thus fully lost its association with in-person performance spaces. Co-option of the term is typically credited to Jaron Lanier, ‘the Father of VR’, who founded VPL Research in 1985 and developed some of the first VR hardware, focusing on visual headsets and headphones, plus integrated gloves with the potential for haptic technology. : ‘Wherever the human body has a sensor, like an eye or an ear, a VR system must present a stimulus to that body part to create an illusory world’, reflecting the desire of virtual reality technologists and futurists that the digital be able to fully engulf and blot out non-alchemical/non-digital existence. Later advances in computer graphics allowed for graphical chat like Second Life to create a strong sense of embodied presence online, which inspired theatre makers to enter this online world, bringing performance and virtual reality back together.
: ‘Gaming is characterised as being immersive, enveloping the player within a 3D environment and being defined by immediacy. … This is a staging of the immersion associated with gaming through a theatrical immersion; inviting the audience to engage in a fictional world created through both live and digital formats’. It has taken decades for headsets and software to approach anything close to this level of immersion at a consumer level, but the communities necessary to sustain interest in this technology have been forming online through videogames and chatrooms as hardware has evolved. Cemented by common interest rather than geographical proximity, these online groups have found innovative ways to gather in virtual spaces, and this has included translating traditional in-person theatre practices into virtual worlds including pre-metaverse platform Second Life, as well as videogames like Fallout 76 and Minecraft.
Naturally, when Covid led to international lockdowns and required isolation from others, the desire to be near people . ‘As with many remote technologies, interest in using social VR as a performance context grew substantially when the coronavirus pandemic shuttered playhouses in early 2020’. If physical co-presence in a theatre building was impossible, theatre makers could find the closest possible sensation. These large virtual online worlds became social gathering spaces – the exact kind of spaces that theatre artists seek. This has led not only to gamers becoming more like theatre makers, but theatre makers becoming more like videogame players, :
… online role-playing – despite involving players who are physically distant from one another and use avatars to serve as their bodies – involves presence, space, and embodiment, just as theatre does. It also possesses the same ontological structure as does theatre. Online role-players’ game-play is play-making, in a new, digital form of theatre that makes every participant a performer. But, perhaps uniquely, this innovation originated not as an avant-garde form guided by the vision of some individual artist or movement, but as a popular entertainment pursued by people who wouldn’t think to call themselves artists, just gamers out to enjoy themselves. To some degree role-playing reverses the marginalization of theatre, precisely through the digital media that seem to threaten it. It is perhaps the first new performance genre with grass roots rather than elite and individualist roots.
While I have labelled this section ‘Virtual Reality Theatre’, several practitioners are using the term ‘XR Theatre’ instead. Jon Jaehnig considered the immersive theatre roots of ‘XR theater’ – XR standing for , ‘an umbrella term for any technology that alters reality by adding digital elements to the physical or real-world environment to any extent and includes but is not limited to, augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR) and virtual reality (VR)’. : ‘While the pandemic played a part in the growth of XR theater, its roots are in immersive theatre’ in which participants ‘converse with actors, manipulate props, and physically move through sets that might take up an entire building’. VR theatre utilises space like immersive theatre might, encouraging the audience’s physical inclusion (or, in VR, avatar-body-presence inclusion) inside the world of the show as Artaud considered it; I have opted here to specify ‘Virtual Reality’ rather than other XR forms like Augmented Reality because I am specifically analysing the sense of presence created within a fully digital, immersive, virtual world.
This YouTube video from creator WheezyWaiter provides a good consumer-level overview of VR's functionality, affordances, and downsides:
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