Virtual Reality: For Theater, a Prologue or Denouement?

By Adam Sanders, 1/30/2019

Imagine walking into a theater space designed in the style of a highly refined Athens and being greeted by actors in the roles of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. You’re shown to your seat; the play begins and, after the first couple of scenes, four ingénues leave the ordered world of Athens and enter its neighboring woods. You put on a virtual reality headset and enter a magical, transformative, intensely immersive experience, something akin to the experiences of the play’s four lovers.

Virtual reality (VR) is emerging as non-profit theaters face a series of reckonings: how can companies attract young and diverse audiences who might not feel like theater speaks to them? How can companies bring their content to audiences who live outside of a reasonable drive to the theater? And, finally, how can theaters slow down rising ticket prices that come from the labor-intensive and resource-heavy medium? Although not without its limitations, virtual reality might offer theater companies a new tool to address some of these deep concerns.

VR is an immersive film-like experience where you view content through the use of a head mounted display. As the headset detects the movements of your head, the content that corresponds to the direction your head is pointed is digitally created and displayed on screen, giving you a 360 degree view of the surroundings. Wherever you look, you will experience the world that the author has created. Virtual Reality has a remarkable sense of depth and can be so lifelike that it stimulates physical and emotional reflexes on the viewer. When this video quality is combined with a narrative production that provides illusions of self-embodiment, physical interaction, and social communication, the sum effect is referred to as “presence.”1 Chris Milk, founder of two VR content aggregating companies, With.in and Vrse, describes what this technology means to an audience:

VR makes us feel like we are part of something. For most of human history, we lived in small family units. We started in caves, then moved to clans and tribes, then villages and towns, and now we're all global citizens. But I believe that we are still hardwired to care the most about the things that are local to us. And VR makes anywhere and anyone feel local. That's why it works as an empathy machine.2

When you are in the middle of a narrative told through VR, Milk explains, “instead of watching a story about people over there, it's now a story about [you] here.”2

It’s an exciting idea with huge potential in a variety of industries. The global VR headset industry is forecasted to see a compound annual growth rate of 35% between 2016 and 2022.3 Facebook demonstrated its interest in the technology by purchasing Oculus VR, one of the major headset manufacturers, for $2 billion in 2014.? But, the technology presents some real challenges for the industry. As Kaya Yurieff of The Street writes in her interview with Rob Lister, IMAX’s chief business development officer:

The consumer proposition for VR has been a "difficult" one so far, Lister said. A VR headset from Oculus...or HTC Vive costs upward of $600 and requires a PC with enough processing power to drive it. "That's a very expensive proposition,"?

James Titcomb notes in the Telegraph: “Cheaper devices that connect to a smartphone provide an inferior experience and drain battery life.”? And even as new, high quality, less expensive headsets like the Oculus Go are released for individual home use ($199 USD for a 32GB “stand alone” unit), companies work to discover what content that will excite mainstream audiences. Perhaps it’s not surprising that headset sales saw a major dip of 30.5% in the first quarter of 20183, hinting that the tech’s penetration of the mass market could face problems. As long as VR is largely a frontier technology and exciting to the general population, and as long as it remains a generally unattractive investment for individual home use, theater companies might be in a position to capitalize on a would-be audience’s curiosity by owning (or renting) headsets and incorporating virtual experiences into theatrical ones, thereby offering audiences an innovative way to experience VR without making an upfront equipment purchase.

Some performing artists have seized the moment and embraced the use of VR in site-specific experiences that blend VR and live performance. Laurie Anderson, known for her multimedia experiments in performance art, has two pieces on display at Mass MoCA and another in development. “Chalkroom” invites viewers to enter the event twice. The first time, they walk into a physical space that is decorated to evoke specific feelings and thoughts around language. They find a seat, and there they encounter the VR equipment (headset, headphones, and controller). Once they don the headset, they are invited to enter the virtual space and explore a world of sound, letters, voiceover, and imagery.?

Laurie Anderson (with Hsin-Chien Huang), The Chalkroom, 2017, wall painting, room installation for VR work, 27.5 x 40.5 x 11 ft. MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA. Photos: Courtesy Canal Street Communications/Laurie Anderson Studio.

More and more artists are exploring this space. This year’s Sundance Festival featured VR/ performance hybrids like “Esperpento,” which features live actors and digital avatars, as well as work by the Royal Shakespeare Company and 3-Legged-Dog.? And faculty and staff at Iowa University are exploring this intersection with students in a devised piece called “Elevator #7”?. Each of these performances asks its audience to come to a specific place, at a specific time, and to take an active role in an imagined world. It’s the kind of experience that audiences have been abandoning to watch on-demand entertainment streamed to their devices.

Theater artists need to pay attention to the virtual reality industry and consider how integrating this new medium into its work might help address their industry’s problems. Can partially digital content help attract digital-native audiences? How can the portability of virtual reality help bring near-theatrical experiences to audiences in remote geographic locations, or audiences physically incapable of attending the theater? And, will the increased access to audiences provide new economies of scale, help recover the upfront cost of creating the digital content, and improve companies’ profitability and lower ticket prices? Of course, successful integration of VR in the performing arts space may help address some of the technology’s problems, spark public interest, promote the creation of new content, and incite innovation.

For theater, the other option is to cling to traditional models and hope with fingers crossed that audiences will rediscover an interest in site-specific, live narratives. Hopefully, the works created by pioneering artists like the ones mentioned here are not isolated experiments, and the industry will embrace VR. How theater responds to this new technology could determine whether VR and theater exist as competitors or partners. I for one hope that we are heading towards a prologue in a new story for theater, and not its ultimate denouement.

Adam Sanders is a theater artist working at the Sorenson Center for the Arts at Babson College and Commonwealth Shakespeare Company.

1. Ching, Teo Choong. “The Concept of Presence in Virtual Reality”, Medium, 27 August 2016. Web. 10 February 2019.
2. “The birth of virtual reality as an art form”, TED2016, February 2016. Web. 29, January, 2019
3. "Virtual Reality (VR) Headsets Market Size, Key Players Analysis, Business Growth, Regional Trends, Development Status, Sales Revenue and Comprehensive Research Study Till 2022."M2 Presswire, 2019.
4. Seetharaman, Deepa. “Oculus Lines Up More Virtual-Reality Content”, The Wall Street Journal, 24 September 2015. Web. 11 February 2019.
5. Yurieff, Kaya. “This Is The Cool New Way IMAX Is Using Virtual Reality To Change Movie Theaters As We Know Them”, The Street, 5 March 2017. Web. 29 January 2019.
6. Titcomb, James. "Virtual Reality Headset Sales Plummet as Early Hype Wanes." Telegraph.co.uk, Jun 19 2018, ProQuest. Web. 27 Jan. 2019.
7. Anderson, L. & Marranca, B. 2018, "Laurie Anderson: Telling Stories in Virtual Reality", PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 37-44.
8. Roettgers, Janko. “PlayStation VR Headsets Selling for $200 for a Limited Time”, Variety, 16 February 2018. Web. 29 January 2019.
9. Solsman, Joan. “At Sundance’s New Frontier, VR and AR go epic, weird and theatrical”, Cnet, 27 January, 2018. Web. 29 January 2019.
10. Nelson, Emily. “UI makes immersive virtual theater a reality”, IowaNow, 12 December 2018. Web. 29 January 2019.

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