Livestreaming Viewer vs. Active Avatars

Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Virtual Reality Theatre > Multiple Forms of Digital Hybridity > Livestreaming Viewer vs. Active Avatars

In July 2023, I watched the YouTube livestream of Ferryman Collective’s Gumball Dreams, their award-winning show which premiered at SWSX 2022. A small number of participating audience members enter the VR world – in 2023, the show was hosted in VRChat – are co-performers, becoming aliens who must interact with Onyx, an ancient artificial intelligence who is losing her Self as she ages (perhaps dying, perhaps evaporating). The audience participants solve puzzles and, individually, have intimate discussions with Onyx. Because I was a passive, livestreaming audience viewer, I never overheard these intimate discussions, and only watched the puzzle-solving scenes. During the livestream, the host-robot, who greets everyone at the beginning of the show and helps the virtual audience onboard into new avatars (like changing costumes), turned to the ‘camera’ and told the livestreaming audience that he wished we were there in the virtual world to fully immerse in the beautiful graphics and the puzzle challenges. It was a reminder of the two levels of experience, that I was not simply watching performers on a television show, but a unique interactive work that I was not fully experiencing since I was not fully immersed with a virtual body.

It is different from OnBoardXR6, which offers multiple levels of viewership to potential audiences, including being an avatar within the virtual world, but ‘wearing’ a ‘life vest’ that denotes they wish to be silent and not actively participate. In the livestream of OBXR6, the video viewers were not directly engaged at all, but treated as a much more passive cinematic audience; in contrast, the robot-host of Gumball Dreams speaking directly into the avatar-camera felt akin to early television, when hosts would look directly at the camera and speak to the audience as individuals.