Distributed Embodiment Across Time and Space: Escape Character's Ongoing Work on Creating Telepresence Participatory Experiences in Sparasso

This slideshow exhibits ongoing work at Escape Character Inc., which I founded to create technology for live, telepresence, participatory theatre and games. Our goal is to explore how intimate theatrical experiences can be manifested across a distance digitally, without a lot of technical expertise required each show. Streaming video of live theatre is in use now, but the audience isn't as engaged as if they were present in the same space as the performance. My collaborators and I are examining a show model that is part immersive theatre, part role-playing video game. The major difficulty of scaling immersive theatre is the number of actors, and amount of narrative, and costly physical space. Similarly, one of the barriers to making role-playing video games more responsive to player input is that no AI is clever enough to manage all the possible novel narrative threads. We are building a new type of content, that is part immersive theatre, and part video game, where one professional actor uses VR equipment as cheap motion capture to play every non-player character (NPC) in a virtual environment for a ticketed, interactive scenario. We call this prototype system Sparasso, after Dionysus's rebirth after dismemberment.

https://ctr.utpjournals.press/doi/suppl/10.3138/ctr.2019.178.issue-x

Some Examples of Embodiment Equipment

In 2008, most motion capture equipment still cost $100,000 or more. In 2010, the Microsoft Xbox Kinect was released with a standalone price of $249 which could cheaply track coarse body motions. The first version of the Kinect is in the lower left of the above image, and the second version is directly above it. The Kinect had many limitations, such as only tracking the body facing a single direction, and not tracking fine motor motions. The Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) headset successfully Kickstarted in 2012, and the consumer version (lower centre) released in 2016. While the big focus of attention in VR technology is on the head-mounted display, it's of great interest to us that consumers now have access to cheap, accurately tracked positions of the hands and head from all directions.

Invocation of a Quest

In our shows, we have four audience members at a time. These audience members aren't passive — we give them a mission which requires them to traverse a virtual space, and to speak to a series of characters, all played by a single actor. If this work was only in the context of video games, we'd call the audience members 'players', but that is ambiguous when also speaking in a theatre context. We don't want our audience members to think of their mission as something they must hurry to solve, as in an Escape Room, but as an adventure they go on, that they have some agency with. We are highly inspired by the Hero's Journey model, popularized by Joseph Campbell. Thus, each of our shows start with a preamble before the threshold is crossed and the show begins. Here, I hand a game controller to a volunteer who is going to go on the adventure with three other volunteers

Started with Real Life Prototyping

While our work is highly technology-dependent, we use technology as a means to an end, not as spectacle in of itself. While working on my PhD in digital gesture-controlled stage performances, I was highly inspired by Jerzy Grotowski's Towards a Poor Theatre, which argues that theatre should not aim for more spectacle to attempt to complete with film or other art forms, and instead should focus on interesting interactions between people. The core question of Escape Character Inc.’s work is: What should an interactive show look like if the audience can freely move about a virtual space, and a performer has the ability to shift between playing multiple characters in that space? Here, we used painters' tape on the ground to define the shape of virtual buildings...