As we’ve met with our project advisers, other members of the ETC faculty, and talked with industry experts and fellow students, there has been a single recurring response to our project and ambitions: “Wow, that sounds amazing, but really hard! Good luck!”
And it’s true! And as we’ve been learning from our experimentation with some of the major available augmented reality hardware (Microsoft HoloLens, Magic Leap, Meta 2, and Apple’s ARKit), none of these devices was really designed with what we are trying to achieve in mind. They all do some pretty amazing things, but the pioneers of AR clearly imagined interacting with a world that was no more than a couple of feet in front of your face. As we are trying to create an experience that allows and audience to sit in a theater and view a performance on stage from a moderate distance, the limitations of what the current generation of the tech can achieve are quickly coming into focus (unlike some of the images inside the headsets we are testing—ZING!).
Still, it’s been exciting to play around with the latest and greatest hardware. Hot off the factory production line is the Magic Leap One: Creator Edition, the source of endless speculation and nay-saying among developers in the AR space.
We’ve only had the chance to play with this thing for a few minutes so far as of this writing, but our early impressions are positive. We’ll be putting it through its paces over the next few days to determine if it has value to our strange, particular needs. In the meantime, it’s been fun to watch a T-Rex fight with some medieval knights on top of a table.
While the tech team has been furiously prototyping with all of the hardware listed above, the others have been working in parallel to identify the story we want to adapt to the stage for this format. There have been a lot of fun ideas tossed around, and the team is beginning to rally around one we want to start working on. There will be more on that front soon, but I’ll leave you this week with some photos of our theater space that we’ll be using for this project. For now, let’s just say that our show selection will be taking this unusual space into account. See you next week!
