Acting up: the stage gets smart
Manchester put on My Name is Peter Stillman,aVRworkwhichaccompanied 59 Productions’ adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass on the main stage.
At the RSC, the team have a toolkit to make the Ariel avatar fly and transform. There are 17 gyroscopic sensors in the costume that pick up movement in a similar way to those used in mobiles to track the location on maps and recreate his movements as avatar in real time, and optical tracking on the set, using projectors to turn the stage into a surface on which Ariel can appear. Off-stage, a computer dubbed “the Big Beast” pulls the virtual strings.
The most difficult part — for fear of “uncanny valley”, where human replicas that don’t quite mimic Homo sapiens repulse us — was showing his face, which used facial real-time technology. Qu ar tley had a headmounted camera which took his facial expressions, so the audience sees his mouth and eyes move. “The technology is in its infancy there,” explains Ellis. “We used it in a particular scene — i t ’s something for us to look at again in the future.” Director Gregory Doran has insisted that this isn’t mere gimmickry. The Tempest features a masque which used the cutting-edge tech of 1610. Doran describes masques as “the multi-media events of their day”, using innovative technology like moving lights and stage machinery that could make people fly and descend from the clouds. In one masque, Oberon entered in a chariot drawn by a polar bear.
Ellis’s inspiration came after she watched the keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas by the chief executive of Intel, Brian Krzanich, in which a digital wizardry whale appeared to swim out of a screen and through an auditorium. Ellis then cold-called Intel to ask if the tech giant would work with the RSC. The Imaginarium Studios, whose founders include Andy Serkis (Gollum in Lord of the Rings), later came on board too.
Although motion-capture technology had been used in film for years, it hadn’t been used live before — it was usually “pre-baked” and then added to a film with CGI. That the trio managed this reflects how quickly technology is improving. “We didn’t think, two years ago, that this would be possible,” says Ellis. “At the start we were looking at Ariel not even appearing on stage.”
It is a theatrical moonshot too: the RSC team say the biggest challenge for Intel was bringing enough power to create the avatar on stage in real time and that it took as much power as it did to put a man on the moon.
So will the “most high miracle” of mixed reality catch on in theatre? The obstacles currently are time and money. But The Tempest hints at a brave new world, that has such wonders in it .
@RosamundUrwin