👀The Eye(ball)s Have It

Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Virtual Reality Theatre > The Eye(ball)s Have It

It is also important for the audience to have familiar touchstones to help them navigate and feel comfortable, especially if they are not used to VR [See also: Spotlight-Audience Onboarding]. The immersion and embodiment in the space is aided when participants understand their relation to the space and others within it, rather than battling it out on a videogame battlefield.

Figure 11: Dressing up for the theatre is a long-standing tradition; in this screengrab, I have chosen a hammerhead shark avatar to attend Ferryman Collective’s production of Finding WiiLii.

As Artaud coined the term virtual reality to analyse the relationship between the mundane and narrative realities overlapping each other, : ‘the taxonomy of [theatre’s] spatial features concerns what I began by calling the physical reality/fictional place duality’, to which McAuley later adds the conceptualised space in which both audience and performer conceive of the play’s world. This space of overlap, whether it is in-person or virtual, delineates where audiences focus their attention and imagination, like an invisible border lining the space of the show. , shifting the idea of theatre etiquette from a physical interaction in a building into a virtual world with new guardrails. In contrast, videogames proffer an immersive world requiring direct player/participant interaction, and simply entering the game is an invitation to push its limits. In Virtual Reality Theatre, the theatre makers are responsible for pushing the digital world’s limits while also outlining where those limits are.

Figure 12: A screenshot from the YouTube Livestream of OBXR6’s ‘i can build it’, featuring the keyboard entry and several A.I.-generated images based on prompts from the audience in Mozilla Hubs.

Figure 13: ‘Wendys x Godzilla 2’ screenshot from the same performance, with Godzilla-Wendy played by Michael Morran getting an image prompt from a dwarfed audience member.

For example, I watched OnBoardXR 6: It’s Pronounced ‘Gybe’ – the 6th and now final instalment of OnBoardXR’s virtual theatre festivals – develop over several weeks in May 2023. Each of the five short performances involved audience interaction to demonstrate the theme of the work, but the creator-performers were present to help the audience learn how to interact with elements in the space. This was particularly important for both ‘i can build it’ and ‘Wendys x Godzilla 2’, which integrated AI image generators that the audience submitted prompts to. In ‘i can build it’, Clemence Debaig developed an onscreen keyboard for audiences to send written prompts through the show into an image generator, then watch these images appear as the backdrop for the show; in ‘Wendys x Godzilla 2’, Michael Morran used templates for a hamburger, fries, and a milkshake, then got prompts from the audience by asking them what kind of food they wanted to order; he then fed the absurd suggestions into his image generator and used the images as skins on the food-objects to produce the desired meal. Both of these methods encouraged the audience to use their imaginations, including any propensity for sprite-like maliciousness, to create silly images that would enhance the show. One evening, for instance, this resulted in a Nicholas Cage burger.

Importantly, generative AI tools have obscenity screening so even if an audience member suggested an upsetting image, and even if Bradley or Morran had allowed these suggestions in their host-curator-performer roles, the image generation tools would not have produced these. Still, considering community management is an impart part of incorporating audiences into VR Theatre.

Theatre makers must also dramaturgically consider two levels of sensory inputs for Virtual Reality Theatre. For Artaud, this doubling of sensation occurred for the audience between the mundane world of the seats and the mystical onstage world of the show. Similarly, digital virtual reality can create a doubled ontology within the spectator. ‘have this “prosthetic” quality that allows the subject to lead a double existence, both within the material world and inside the simulation’. If the simulation works as it should, your perception of ‘two streams of data’ leads you to focus on the virtual experience, integrating outside perceptions (like temperature or physical objects) as part of the overall virtual work; however, e that ‘a “break in presence” thus occurs when “the participant stops responding to the virtual stream and instead responds to the real sensory stream”’. ll. One approach VR theatre makers including Bradley, Morran, Debaig, and Ferryman Collective incorporate is Audience Off-Boarding.