A “Virtual Performance Platform” would enable multiple-location live events in which there are two classes of participants:
- “lead performers” (e.g. actors, dancers, presenters);
- “audience performers” (a larger group of participants who also interact in the context of the event).
The “content” of the event (characters, story, setting, even the type of interaction … dance, theater, narrative installation, etc.) is flexible and easy to create and modify.
This general concept leads to the following preliminary requirements:
- The lead performer in each location wears a high-resolution motion capture system, which supplies data to drive (for example) a virtual body in real time.- The virtual bodies interact in a shared virtual space which is visible in each location.
- A lower-resolution sensing system captures data of some kind from the “audience performers”; ideally, each audience member has some individual input or distinguishable impact on the data.
- The data from the audience sensing system is also represented in the shared virtual space.
- The particular representations of the lead performer and audience performer data, as well as the virtual setting, need to be easy to create and modify, so this should be based on widely available content creation tools.