VR Performance

– And the advantage that this puppet would have over a human dancer?
– The advantage? First of all, a negative one, my excellent friend, namely, this, that the marionette would never be self–conscious…

Heinrich v. Kleist, On the Marionette Theatre, 1810

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How can VR function as theatre and create a live encounter in a social space?

Marionette Theatre 3.0 had two theatre machines come face to face with each other: Virtual Reality becomes enmeshed with the automaton or marionette of the non-human performer, as Heinrich v. Kleist explored in his seminal if cryptic theatre essay “On the Marionette Theatre” (1810).

Technology used for VR Performance

Wireless Meta Quest 2 systems were our headsets.
In them, the modelled VR space geometrically copies the physical space.
The headsets were furnished with dedicated laser calibration systems that allow for an exact mapping of virtual onto physical space and to allow the fusion of virtual with physical objects.
In the centre of the space, one finds a virtual glass elevator that takes the visitor to another floor and into a Rococo motion capture performance.
The positional tracking is handled by an added mounted VIVE-tracker.
The combined data are streamed, filtered and fused to a steering computer in the space and are then streamed in real time to a Unity-App.
Unity then projects the movements onto an avatar that can be selected and positioned in space by the steering computer which in turn sends the data onto a photon multiplayer server.
The multiplayer server streams the data to all connected Quest 2 headsets and creates a live audio connection.
That way, an interaction between different floors becomes possible: visitor and performer are physically separate but virtually connected.