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You Should Have Stayed Home: How to Captivate an Audience in VR Theatre

Published: 07 November 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Several recent productions have explored how theatrical performances can be performed in virtual reality. Their audiences move around the show’s virtual world, interact with its set, and listen to live performers. These virtual reality performances suggest a new form of digital play that utilizes the audience’s embodiment in the world and participation in its story to immerse them in it. In this paper, we describe how audiences interacted with the virtual reality play You Should Have Stayed Home. We contribute a design space for audio-visual entertainment media, use it to contextualize virtual reality theatre, and discuss how the show’s use of virtual reality technologies shaped how audiences play it.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI PLAY '22: Extended Abstracts of the 2022 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play
      November 2022
      419 pages
      ISBN:9781450392112
      DOI:10.1145/3505270
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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      Published: 07 November 2022

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      1. VR Play
      2. VR Theatre
      3. Virtual Reality

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