Immersive theater is on a collision course with virtual reality. There are so many best practices for interactive storytelling that are easily translatable into VR. Immersive Theater troupe Third Rail Projects produced the acclaimed Then She Fell, which only serves 15 audience members per show allowing for deeply intimate and personal engagement with audience members. They’ve been developing best practices for embodied communication and non-verbally engaging audience members, and starting to bring these insights into virtual reality experiences like Wolves in the Walls by Fable Studios and Oculus Studios.
I talked with immersive theater actor Alberto Denis from Third Rail Projects at the inaugural Immersive Design Summit in 2018 where he share so many deep insights for how immersive theater insights are directly informing immersive storytelling with VR & AR.
Denis has performed in over 900 shows, and in every single show he saw something he’s never seen before, and so we also talk about the limits of AI and computational non-player characters, and why the embodied intuition of an immersive theater actor is going to be hard to replicate with technology alone.
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Music: Fatality
