 now. So we thought you could use an energizing speech for the Saturday and give you a nice end of this meeting. So he's a friend of ours. It's Mr. Joris Weidem. Give him a big hand. Joris? Let's see if we have some sound. Yeah, good. I've been told I have one hour with you, which I'm really happy with, because I have a lot to tell. At the same time I also understand that you need to be somewhere else at one o'clock, so I'll try to stay within that hour. But there's a lot to share, so let's get to it. The thing is that I was asked to do this presentation, but I'm not yet too aware of your organization and the dialogues that are going on. So if some things are too simplified, I'm sorry, and if some things become too complicated, I'm sorry as well. So I tried to stay in the middle more or less. Yeah, so I will introduce myself, but first a little bit about this lecture. It's called Mixed Reality and the Theater of the Future, which is of course a ridiculous pretentious title. So maybe it should be Mixed Reality and the Future of Theater, but that's even worse probably. I hope you get nervous because of that, and I thought maybe this is better. Is there any future for theater? Because let me start by saying I'm not a theater maker. So I feel honored to be here, and I'm very happy I'm invited to do this lecture. And at the same time I feel really anxious because I'm not a professional in the sense that I make theater myself. Actually, I'm a Mixed Reality designer and researcher. I'm also a lecturer and I'm an initiator of the Media and Performance Laboratory space at the University of the Arts Utrecht, and I also teach master and bachelor courses. So I'm very much embedded in education and research. What I used to love when I started to study myself was virtual reality. That's sort of in the 90s, a long time ago, and I really, I wanted to be somewhere else. I was an escapist. I wanted to be in cyberspace and be God and do anything I like. But I'm a bit older now and I sort of like the world. I like my body. I like nature. So more and more I start to shift in this more mixed idea or augmented reality. To take reality as the substance and then augment that into other kinds of experiences. Just very briefly, we've been doing research at our laboratory on making processes. So I will show you a lot of products and end results, but what interests me the most is the making itself and the process of making and mostly also in an interdisciplinary form. And I use technology in those processes, and that's a challenge because technology sometimes can be counterintuitive, countercreative. It can be linear and rigid. So how to use this technology in a creative making process that is suitable for theater makers and performers to try things out on the stage. That's the question. I have to watch my time already. But I will talk in this talk about mixed reality most of the time because I think it's relevant, especially in this particular year now that Oculus Rift and all these H&D helmets are being produced. So let's go there. What I'm not going to talk about is digital performance in general. I'm not going to give you a lecture about that. I'm not a scholar and I haven't studied this. So if you're interested, please buy this book or other books. You're probably already aware of these books. So there's a lot out there that I won't talk about. And I noticed that you're already really in this discussion about new media and the Internet of Things and how do we deal with this, how incorporate this into the storytelling we want to do. And funny enough, I saw a remark on your own website saying, interesting, I'm wondering if there will be a similar session in Amsterdam. Well, I hope Mr. Roland de Graaf, you're here. Are you here? Oh, that's a shame. Well, this is it. All right. So I want to talk about three developments. And these are technological developments, but they're also cultural, they're political. And I think they're relevant. First of all, the Internet of Things, transmedia and mixed reality. And like I said, I will really speed up a little bit at some point to get to the mixed reality part. So if you get like, okay, I cannot keep this up. We have like six cameras in the room and everything will be recorded. So later you can see it online again. If you had moments where you were somewhere else, you can look at the Internet and pick it up. So let's start with the Internet of Things. The Internet of Things is just a word, but it stands for something that is a development that is going on already for a little while. You might know the idea of quantified self. So we're more and more having devices on our bodies that are measuring things of our bodies and location and things like that. Of course, we all have smartphones, there are sensors in there as well. And that's being shared with all sorts of companies who are very interested in our behavior, of course. But in an open source sense, it's also data that is interesting to ourselves and interesting maybe to theater makers. What I find interesting is that for example, this baby here is having a monitor and it can actually do heartbeat and sleeping rhythms and things like that. You can see that on your mobile phone. So you can just leave your baby at home nowadays and just do your thing. Wonderful development. So the thing is, two years ago I did this talk as well about the Internet of Things. And interestingly enough, around 2012, interesting year, we shifted to a percentage of online traffic from human to non-human. So the majority of traffic online was actually non-human, right? Which I thought was very interesting. I like these scenarios where machines take over and stuff like that. And it's actually happening. But funny enough, when I checked it for this lecture for this year, we're referring back. So the human activity is sort of getting more again. So we're still there. We're still sort of winning or not. But it's interesting to see that you have to understand that the Internet of Things is not mostly about people. It's about devices talking to each other. Now, that is going to rocket. So of course, anything you buy, we'll start talking to the Internet and to companies if you don't meet the license agreements well. And it means that they predict, these are predictions, that we probably carry about 26 smart objects in 2020. And the big data, all this data that's being generated will explode. And of course, everybody's very interested in what to do with this. Maybe it's also interesting to realize it's not only about devices on our bodies, it's our whole world is being rigged and wired with sensors. So they call these smart cities. Now, I put smart in between brackets because being smart is something else than just collecting a lot of data, of course. But the fact is that there's more and more spaces that sense what's going on. And not only in the cities, not only about traffic, but also water pollution, all sorts of logistics in any sense are being measured. And now that we have the Internet, those data is more and more also being connected. But this is the thing. The Internet of Things and smart cities, I don't hear any human perspective in these developments. So thank God for open source. Open source development is trying to keep up and also create all sorts of networks that you, as artists, can make use of. So they're creating SDKs and sort of plug and play devices that you can connect with yourself and start using that data for your own ideas and artistic and creative ideas. So that is sort of like liberating that particular development into an open domain. And especially Amsterdam is actually really active with this. And there's also the Waag Society who is working with the Smart Citizens Lab. The Things Network is now a Kickstarter so we can start sharing all this data together. So this is stuff that is interesting for you to sort of start, well, maybe look at and maybe play with. And of course then the smart city becomes smart citizens. Good. So what does this have to do with theater? Well, maybe we can get some sound on the laptop. A little performance a long time ago, in the 90s already, by one of the dinosaurs of performance art and technology, Stellark. And what you see here is, yeah, great, thanks. What you see here is that Stellark is performing a robot arm and he's having a robot arm on his own arm. There's also an extra robot arm next to him. And his heart rate is measured and all sorts of things are measured. And this data is being used for all sorts of output. So things go in and things go out of the system. Interestingly enough, he also had electrodes on his body, mostly his legs, and people on the internet, and this is 96, so that were early adopters, they could sort of press buttons and give him currents on his muscles through internet. So part of his movement is what he is trying to do. And others are involuntary because the audience through the internet is also interfering with his performance. I think that's a very interesting idea and it's already early developments. Just to promote a local researcher who is also part of our research center, Marluk van der Vlucht, she has done many experiments with sensors where she puts sensors on her own body and participants need to come in and touch her body, actually. And it is really about privacy, intimacy, and how stories unfold from the body. And another example of her work is that she would have a room like this and all the chairs would be rigged with sensors and on the basis of how active or passive you're sitting, the theater light would change. So if everybody is lazy, you don't see anything, right? So which I think is interesting. So this is about audience participation and it's about creating almost like an ecology, like a space that connects audience, performers, and the space itself. We know, of course, of many experiments that is using public space, remedy protocol, or blast theory, and of course you probably know a lot more examples. But the core thing I want to say here is that what is interesting about these things is that audience not only becomes participating, but they almost become like performers. Because if they're in a public space in some sort of performative code and they're doing things, there's also people there in the public space who have no idea that you're part of a theater play. So you become performer in the public space plus, and that's another thing, of course, of the internet, spaces become connected. So the theater space, we're now again in this nice frontal theater space with the doors closing and everything. But of course, it's interesting that the internet of things and internet in general is connecting everything with everything. So what does this mean for theater? Well, like I just said, performers, audience, and spaces can be at multiple locations at the same time, sharing a connected experience. Performers and audiences can get connected with the output system of spaces and become sensitive. So that would mean like you're now interfering with the theater lights or you're interfering with my slideshow or you're interfering with my body if I'm rigged in whatever way. And performers, audience, and spaces can influence and manipulate each other. Input output systems, well, yeah, that's maybe too technical, technical, but at least I think the classic theater, and I was already connecting to some of the theater technicians, he's sitting there, of course, in the dark because I don't know why, but they are not supposed to be seen. But they're there and they're there, they're everywhere. And then the interesting thing is that the whole theater space is rigged in a very hierarchical system. So it all goes to that table over there and some there and some there. But the internet of things is modular. So the idea is that everybody in the room potentially can become an operator or a performer of a given system. I'm still on track, that's good. And for that reason, if you would say if cities become sensitive and generating all this data, isn't it interesting that you can use that data for your own performance purposes? So the traffic and the trams that are riding in front of this room could be part of what is happening here. Or, well, let's not get too political now. I was thinking about refugees and stuff like that. But anyway, yeah, so, transmedia. What it's not is this. So it's not the same story in different media, right? It's not like we have the film and we have the book and we have the game and we etc. You could call that cross media or multimedia. But anyway, it's not transmedia. It's also not the recording of theater plays on a website so you can see them again, right? That's not transmedia. It's media-tized, but it's not transmedia. This is transmedia. Welcome. Freshers is a Dutch television series about the members of the notorious fraternity HSC Mercurius. During the second season, we started a transmedia pilot where fans could join the fraternity. We found out that this is what people want. They want to be part of the story world. This year, Freshers didn't only air the third season, but also released a feature film. BNN, Elastique and Spectre decided to kick off a real transmedia campaign with multiple layers of interaction. One, watch. Downloading the mobile app allowed you to watch next... Why don't you watch the film yourself? The thing is that they started off with this linear medium-cool television and there was a growing public liking that particular series. Then they started on Facebook and they noticed that the audience members wanted to become part of that fraternity. They wanted to be in that experience of being a student and partying and everything involved. So they started these Facebook events and they started like a mobile app where you could do games and get invited and stuff like that. And from that perspective, people got so enthusiastic, they started to organize their own parties. And that's interesting because then the makers of the actual series and the transmedia product were actually thinking, wait a minute, if everybody's now going to direct all sorts of parties and stuff like that, we're out of control because we cannot direct exactly everything anymore. But it is interesting because of course this audience become more involved with the whole story and then writers started to get it. So they went to those parties and they went to those network meetings and they followed all the Facebook pages and a few of the audience members became so active, they started to play a role in it and they incorporated that back into the television series. So here you see an interesting loop of a story world that evolves almost into public space where media and different media are being used as different platforms to give entrances to this story world. But I don't know if there are any people from funding organizations, they have a little problem with transmedia. Why? Because they want to see the numbers, like how many people did actually participate? If it's interactive, great, how many then? And here we get the 1990 rule. The thing is 90% of people are actually just watching, they're passive, they're following the stories and they like to look on Facebook and they like to maybe look at the games and who's winning but they're not interested in participating. 9% once in a while does that, yeah? They sort of throw in something to see if it actually the system responds, if there's a reaction, but more or less they're also a bit laid back. And only 1% of all participants are actively participating. Now, here funders say transmedia is lost money. My answer to this is no. For the simple reason that 99% of all the audience is following that 1% as being part of their audience, right? There's like, yeah, it's one of us now interfering with this story world. And the moment they realize it would be fake, they would stop watching. So this 1% become representatives of a much larger audience. So it's very important to keep that in mind when you're working with this transmedia. All right, so that brings me a little bit back to participation in theater. I've had several wonderful accounts with Annette Amaze. She used to work at Coney in the UK. They then done a lot of participatory theater pieces. And what I really liked is that she was talking about levels of participation. So it's not you're either interactive or you're not, problematic word anyway, but you just go with it or you just sit and you just watch it. Now there are many levels of participation. So it could be that once in a while you do something and then you sit back again. And other people's only want to watch. And some people say, well, I want to be more active. And now I've, well, I'd like to see what is happening. So there's level of participation that you need to design. What is interesting to them is that they actually got everybody involved on stage. So actors and participating audience were sort of blended together. And they had to sort of reinvent society as part of their theater work. Okay. So whether you're doing it in the theater or whether you're using many podia, what this trans media is actually inviting us to is that audience become co-makers. They become co-creative, so to speak. And this has a lot of consequences. Undoubtedly you understand that yourself. For example, if you consider every medium a stage, what does that mean for directing those stages, right? Directing a social media stage is different than directing some actors on a physical stage like this. It's important to design these levels of participation and be aware of the one 990 rule. So really investing is 1% in order to get the 99% of the people being interested. But there's consequences. The consequences of co-creation with audience is of course that you get the idea of personalized feedback. Because if I want to participate, but I feel it's a system responding with general answers, I don't feel being talked to. So how do you personalize that experience? That's a big challenge. Another thing is of course that the story needs to adapt, because my behavior and response will be different from others. So it means you get not even multi-linear stories, but you get hybrid stories evolving over time. So you also have to adapt your stories all the time on the basis of what's going on. And then of course we have authorship issues. I know a lot of theater and playwrights don't like these developments because, you know, they have to co-create and co-write. And that's the same for directors. Just to mention, there's a lot of development of platforms that facilitate partly these kind of experiences in these projects, these products. And Conductor, for example, by Robert Pratt and developed in the UK, is an interesting platform where you can connect all sorts of social media to Internet of Things kind of thinking to mobile apps. And as we speak, we're also talking to him like, and how does that connect to theater space like this? He's very interested in that. So I don't hold any stock. I don't get paid for saying this, but I'm just a fan of his work. So if you're interested, have a look at their platform. How are we doing? Yeah? Still awake? Yeah? Good. You're stimulated. Good. In a good way, I hope. Okay. Exciting. All right. Well, okay, good. Nice. Can we have a bit more light in the room? Because I'm looking in this, ah, there you are. Oh, a lot of people came. All right. Hi, I'm Joris for the people who came later. We're halfway. We're going to do a talk about technological development. And this is the part I'm really excited about myself. So I will now skip or move on to mixed reality. What is mixed reality? Well, it's a scale. It's not one thing or the other. It's a mix between the real and the virtual. What's then virtual? Well, yeah, that's the story. Let's not get into that too much. But if you sort of understand what virtual means, sort of like not real, it refers to the merging of the real and the virtual worlds to produce new environments where physical and digital objects coexist and interact in real time. And we call this the virtuality continuum. So if you make an experience, you design an experience, you can have that experience anywhere on this scale and it can also move. So it can be completely virtual and can can moments where it's completely real and everything in between. So also over time, you could shift in that scale. And I think I like scales because it's not a black and white discussion. It's something you can creatively move back and forth. All right, you probably have heard of the Oculus Rift. Who has heard of the Oculus Rift? Yeah, who has already had an Oculus Rift on his head? 20% or so. All right, good, a bit more, maybe. Okay, well, so you understand this. So this is a demo of a guy having a helmet. The direction he is looking is what we're seeing on the screen in the background. It's stereoscopic. So you feel you're like in this movie bubble, so to speak. And if it's real time 3D, it can it can also be interactive. It's I hope you understand that sort of at the virtual end of the experience, right? And we're in an interesting year. Like I mentioned, in the 90s, when I went to school, I actually I wanted this. And then it got quiet for like 25 years for some reason. And now suddenly it's happening. Like, yeah, now I'm used to nature and I want to be somewhere else. But anyway. But it's interesting because if you compare these 90s photographs with the 2016 commercial promise of VR, I hope you understand how similar it looks. So anyway, what's new? That's a question. Because of course, companies like to say things are new. But they're not. So this is for the people who are not from Holland. This is the 360 degree huge panorama painting hanging in the Hague by Willem Estag, made in 1880s. And it's a 360 view of the beach of Schreveningen. Thank you. Good. Some interaction. Yes. All right. So people are standing in the middle and they look around and they sort of experience a beach at Schreveningen. It's also a time capsule, which is interesting. And it's the distilled time capsule of the 1880s. So this idea of immersion is of course much older. When I started to study, we had Cardavis, for example, already creating also immersive VR installations. And in this case, the breathing of the participant was navigating you through some sort of virtual space. And that's interesting because when you're breathing consciously, a lot happens to your physiology. Yeah. So people got really spaced out when they were in there for about 15 minutes, which he actually wanted. And also already in the 1950s, there was the Senso Rama, but more than highly who was trying to create this totally immersive box. I think the drawing is fantastic. It's sort of a warning for where we're going to. There's already this VR cinema here in Amsterdam. You've seen pictures of that. It's funny. Everybody with a helmet on not talking to each other. Interesting. So, but he said theater is an activity that could encompass all of the senses in a very effective manner. Just drawing the viewer into the onscreen activity. He called it experience theater. So what does that mean? Well, we don't know yet. That's what I would like to say. But for sure the whole movie industry is moving now into what they call VR. I don't call this VR. It's just 360 movies, right? So they're having a lot of development going on and whole post production pipelines to create like big movies in 360. So how you work with post production, things like this, but this by the mill in collaboration with Google, you can actually download it. It's called spotlight stories. If you have an Android phone, just download it, have a Google cardboard, have a look at it yourself. I find this like the same what happened when the film camera was invented. The first things they recorded was theater, right? So the moment one person took the camera is like something changed or got closer. Something changed, right? So then movie started and he could cut the film. Something changed. It was not theater anymore. But now I see movie makers moving into the VR industry thinking it's about movie making. I will show you an example of theater makers as well. And game makers are doing the same thing. They're making games inside of a platform. I would say it's a new platform. So let's not be too fast in thinking it's just another screen. Interestingly enough, there's this notion of the frame. So movie makers are learned to think in a frame and they direct the frame. And that's how you frame your story, right? Now, I think it's interesting that with the 360 helmets on, there's no frame because I can decide what I look at and when I look at it. So the example I just showed you is more like follow the action. So there's the monster, I'll just follow the monster and they sort of think that's directing. So I immediately am very tempted to not look at the monster and see what is happening elsewhere, right? Not a lot. So why use 360? I think this is interesting for journalism because you probably know a lot of journalists are framing, you know, like three people burning a flag here while people are shopping and having daily lives here, right? So I think it's very interesting. You have a 360 camera and you can decide what you want to frame or not. So for journalism, this is an interesting development. But here it goes. Maybe I have sound for a moment. Oh, I did that myself. Sorry. Whoa, okay. Whoa, I have a body. I don't know that. Am I a guy or a girl? Do I have luscious baps? Okay, butterflies now. Well then, I didn't know those butterfly o'clock. What? What in the world? Oh, that's new. Okay, just to summarize the general experience of a first time VR demo, but the depth of this experience is just enormous. Very dramaturgical layers there. And yeah, so I hope you understand where we're going with this talk. But the thing is, this is an interesting demo because the demo is done in real time 3D. It's a computer real time 3D graphic environment. And that means that the environment can adapt to what I'm looking at. It's called Sightline the Chair. It's already three years old. And I think it's one of the best demos I've seen when it comes to the promise of a new platform, a new podium. Why? Because as you can see, when he looks at something, when I look at you, for example, yeah, and I look away and I see, okay, I see this. And when I look back, you're gone and there's a forest, right? I wish that, no, I don't. I'm happy you're here. No, so the interesting thing is the interaction of the sight line is a trigger for change, but they don't put the change in the image. They put the change everywhere else, right? Which I find very, very fascinating. I'm a little bit into Buddhism. I think this is a very interesting notion that of course, we try with our mind to fixate everything and say this is how it is. But of course, everything is changed. So I think it's an interesting demo that is exploring the potential of VR and real time 3D. We have been working in our lab with these things in a very low technological way. So we just put little streaming cameras with the parabolic mirror. We stream that to an output mirror where we, this red thing that you see here moving, is actually the field of view of the person who's wearing the helmet. And then we had just some stuff on a table and sort of experiment how we can direct the attention of a person, how we can change scenery when they're not looking, what would happen if we would move the camera around, which was a system like this, so people can sit inside and have experiences outside. Interesting, somebody said it's like my head is on a stick, which is actually true, because he's looking through this camera. So you're walking around with somebody on a stick and you just stick it anywhere and have a different perspective on things. So this idea of user perspectives is what I think is one of the creative challenges we're facing. A little bit about performance and presence, which are probably terms you're very familiar with and better than I am, but it's interesting to note that the fact is when technologists talk about performance, what they actually mean is if the technology actually does what they hoped it would do. I would say theater makers would rather have a successful performance where things start happening that they didn't know of yet. So it's a different approach to the idea of performance. And presence by these technologists is translated into something like this. Presence is a short version of the term telepresence, and it's a psychological state of subjective perception in which all of the individual's perception fails fails to accurately acknowledge the role of the technology in the experience. So here we go, technology saying if we make this system so perfect that you don't see the system anymore, you're totally somewhere else. We can transport your presence somewhere else. That's what they think. Now you have to say, haha, we know better. Because first of all this, I think you have a better idea of what presence means. And it's definitely not about mediating or tricking the mind. It's about being here together. And theater is life. So how do we translate this quality through technology? That's an interesting question, I think. For example, we have here dancers and they're being captured with the motion capture studio. So that dance is then put into the computer. You probably have seen this before. So she's running around and there's a lot of cameras looking at her and then they generate this virtual 3D character and that adapts the same motion. But this is called motion capture. The question is, is the presence of the dancer also captured, right? Well, I have to admit that I haven't been in this particular experience. You will have a helmet on and so you're sort of in the same virtual space as that dancer and you have to control so you could also make some visuals yourself. So the idea is that you can dance with her. I have spoken to a few people who have been in this demo and they said, yeah, I wasn't sure because she was just doing her dance. She was not responding to what I was doing. Well, there you go. So we got a capture of her performance in another moment in time. So maybe she has some form of residue presence, but there was definitely no interaction and no felt presence of that dancer. I'm just maybe not so fair. I'm using this example and I think these examples are very important to do. So no bad things about this interspace VR guys. They're doing wonderful work, but I think there's a lot of work to do still. So another thing to look at this is to say we're not going to translate everything into a virtual space, but we're going to combine the physical and the virtual. Okay, that's Miriam and she's talking about. So I'll do a quick translation. What they're doing is they're participants at a festival, like a festival with all sorts of music and stuff like that. You can go there and you get the helmet on, but you're also welcomed by this character, her who's in the movie, but also physically there and they constantly swap between life and not life, real and not real. And they're constantly playing with questions like, what do you think now is happening? Where are you? Stuff like that. And the fact that she's there physically present around you makes a huge difference of course to the experience because you just met her. You shook her hand, right? So that changes also the perception of the moment where you're in this 360 movie. Okay. And that brings me to a wonderful work of crew and actually the creative director is sitting right here. It's an older piece though. They're presenting their work here in this festival as well, but they're now into MoCap as well. But in the old days way before Oculus Rift, they're already working with this technology themselves. They developed it themselves. And what I find very interesting about their work is that not only is audience participating, so they're inside this 360 experience, there's also people looking at them. So there are many perspectives to this experience. But it's also you have a helper, a person who helps you through the experience. So every participant has its own helper. And they're doing physiological manipulations with you. They put you on a certain angle, they touch your arm in certain moments when the movie is also pretending to touch your arm. And there's constant this dialogue between the physical and the virtual. And this is pre-recorded video, but that's still the moment where those things are synchronized works really well. Now I'm interested because I'm telling this already for a long time whether it's true or not. Interestingly enough, there's a certain angle in which your inner ear doesn't know which angle you are. So that gives a certain dizziness to your mind, not knowing in which direction up and down is. So that's a physiological way of getting people to transfer themselves almost like physiologically into this disorienting world. Another thing was is that the person who helped me was not so good. That is to say, she was not always precisely on time. And I got a bit annoyed because I like this perfect illusion, right? I want it to be somewhere else. So every time I saw the movie sort of touching my arm and she was late. So when I was done, I started to complain. So I'm not sure if I asked Ike yours or I asked some of his colleagues and I said, you know, I really, you should train your people better because I was really annoyed. And then as I remember correctly, they said something like the interesting thing with the brain is when the perfect illusion is always there, it gets lazy because there's no change anymore. Things are consistent. So you more or less go to sleep. So the moment where things don't fit, you wake up again, because there's some tension between what you feel and what you see. And that wakes you up. So the next time the perfect illusion is there, you're really white in it. So I think that is very interesting where you see physiology as design ingredients. And I can tell you, everybody who had this helmet on, it's a very physical experience. It's not about your mind being somewhere else. It's a very physical experience. So we've been working with a theater maker of Madsar, Madsar the theater productions. And she was interested in that's me talking to me while I'm talking here. Yeah. So she wanted to create a Yerunbol story about angels and demons and the inner dialogue. And we wanted to create an installation that was partly theatrical. Because what I noticed is that when people sitting with those helmets on, I'm not a sonographer, but with a sonocrophal look, I'm like, that's an interesting image, is it? Because people are here and they're not here and they're elsewhere and they're not. So what we created was a space with a lot of projection mapped environments where we sometimes showed what the person was seeing inside and sometimes we project in completely different stuff. So the people who are looking from the outside make a different story than the person who is inside. And then of course the person who is inside can become a character for this outside world, etc. Now, Marlena Madsar was very brave in trying to figure this out. But she made an interesting choice. She decided as a director to sit in the middle of it with this helmet on. And that changed her perspective on this whole story a lot. And in the lab, we sort of figured that there was a very big moment in because she at some point she didn't know anymore how to proceed. She was literally lost in the process and in all these worlds. So then we had in the last day the dramaturk. And the dramaturk came and she put the dramaturk on that chair with the helmet on. And it was the first time that day she sort of took some distance from what was going on. And she said, ah, wait a minute, right? So it's interesting that this designing these multiple spaces and these multiple perspectives means you also have to take those multiple perspectives yourself. And now this. Let's see this already. This is a promo. Clearly. Very American. All right, so I have to admit part of me really likes this, but but I also become critical right after. Don't worry. No, so the thing is, this is where the commercial industry is heading, right? This is called The Void. And The Void is an entertainment center, a physical space in which you can walk around wirelessly with those helmets on with, of course, machine guns. And then I don't know if you have ever done laser gaming or something like that. It's something like that, but then like 3.0. And so they project in the helmet, physically correct imagery on top of the physical space in which you were running around. So basically, they're incorporating the whole physical experience in this virtual environment. And so they will build and it, that's what they're saying, 300 of these parks around the world. Majority comes to be in China. But as far as I understood rightly, they're going to be two in Holland. And so it's interesting because what they're creating is like a heart where there's a new podium, in fact, right? But of course, if you let a Hollywood industry design the experiences, for sure, their monsters and their dragons and their robots, because they're all guys who want to have a certain experience. But because we don't hunt anymore, you know. So, but the thing is, I'm here in a room with storytellers that try to tell other stories and layered stories, right? So I would ask you, what would you do with this? Right? That would be very, very interesting to me. I will come and consume it. We have tried this out ourselves in the lab, because you might think, and I can imagine, wow, that's way too high-tech and it's probably going to cost a lot and being very difficult and counterproductive on my creative process. And well, yeah, partly true, partly true. But I would also say they're dying for good stories. The industry currently are pumping millions and millions of dollars in these technologies and they're not quite sure what to do with it, right? So I don't know how the funding in your countries are when it comes to theater, but maybe interesting to see if you can earn your money also on other podium. The thing is, we tried this with our own mocap system. And what we've done here very quickly, this is the virtual space. I stole it from Unity. That's a 3D engine. It's just a, we didn't make that. Unity did that. And there's a person with the Oculus Rift and he sees a virtual box, but there's also a physical box and those spaces are sort of tracked, so they're connected. So the moment he walks over to that virtual box and he picks it, he actually feels a physical box and he can look around it. And then there's another person who's a third person, third person person, interesting, who has a game controller and he is actually having a crane, a virtual crane, and they have to work together. So he has to walk with the box to another part of the room. It looks very stupid because he just has this white block, but he is having this robot experience and he has to hold it up like this. There is no crane and there's another person staring the crane and then they have to work together and the box is picked up and so on. Just a little test, but I can tell you the moment where I felt that physical feedback with the virtual world, my brain kicked in and like, maybe this is real, which is not all the time happening, but there is something to this tactility that is very interesting. One big problem, if you combine virtual and physical spaces and the virtual space is huge, what do we end up with? With needing a huge physical space because if somebody needs to run through a whole way of 50 meters, you need a 50-meter hallway, whether they have a helmet on or not. Now, of course, there's a lot of very interesting contraptions being developed right now to keep people in one place, right, which are treadmills. So we all become hamsters soon. But the void and I know crew has done this as well and they just, again, they stole these ideas and they're earning money with it now, but there is an idea about redirective walking. The fact is, if you blindfold people and you ask them to walk a straight line, after a few meters they tend to go like this and it's because legs are shorter or there's something in their ears or whatever is happening, they cannot walk a straight line. We use vision a lot to know what is front, right. Now, you can make use of that. So what they have done, and this is quite brilliant, this round thing is the actual physical space and while somebody is walking through this hallway that is curved, they show a straight line in a helmet. So while you're actually moving like this, you think you're going in a straight line. And that's interesting because that means when somebody's walking half a circle, he thinks he's in the next room, but he's actually in the same room from a different angle. Interesting, huh? I think that's really cool. Has great potential also. Okay, so wonderful. I have two minutes left to talk about augmented reality. This is HoloLens, Microsoft is, I mean, first we had markers and telephones and stuff and then we had Google Glass, but now there are helmets being devolved that actually are spatially aware. So they're tracking the environment and because they sort of see 3D, right? And for that reason, everything they put on top of it fits the physical space. And then you can finally augment reality. Now, then you get all these way too fancy promo videos to promise things, but there are now also demos being shown and I can tell you it doesn't look as good as this, but it's getting there. So this idea of combining the physical and the virtual space is interesting because as you see all the examples they're showing are very embodied, haptic interactions with these virtual elements in a physical space, which is where we reside. I mean, our interface is our body, right? So, just a warning. Um, you want to be in a kitchen like this? I think there are a lot of companies who think this is really cool. So probably you can buy it soon and your fridge is going to talk to you and stuff like that. This is internet of things combined with social media combined with augmented reality, right? But what is actually happening here? Well, it's just the environment telling you how to make a cup of tea. So again, augmenting reality is not just about adding layers of information. And even big companies are now aware that storytelling is probably a right way to go about a lot of things. And I think I'm in a room here with people who actually understand what that means. Thank God they're more artists. So Julian Oliver's work is interesting to look at, I think, one of the things he's shown already in 2008, he made binoculars that could actually recognize commercial billboards. So Coca-Cola commercial, right? And he would work with local artists and then the billboard was replaced by local art. So he was reclaiming the public space as a gallery for local artists by using commercials as tags, right? Which I think is wonderful. And Sander Feyenoff, which is a local augmented reality specialist, is actually hacking, he went to, for example, he hacked the White House. He put an artwork inside of the White House and then told everybody to go there to see it. He went to Biennale in Venice and it was in this large pavilion where you have, you know, this pretentious and a lot of money kind of look at this is high art kind of experience. And he put his like almost graffiti art right in the middle because it's GPS. He can just put his virtual world anywhere he likes. He put it right in the middle. So the story says, and he told me, I haven't been there, is that more and more people were not looking at the actual venue, but they were looking around with cameras like this, right? And I think that is a very liberating thought. We can sort of reclaim all sorts of spaces, both public and political spaces in this way by augmenting reality, by actually adding layers that are artistically interesting or asking questions at least. So, well, theater is mixed reality, right? Which I already saw in your discussions and so I hope you agree on this. Yeah, so you have been working with this already for 3000 years. I would say that's an advantage because you have thought about it and you've gone through postmodern times and you have been critical about it. And so and there's a language for it called dramaturgy and you know, you're so incredibly aware of what you're doing that you're way ahead of all the other industries, yeah? I call them industries, sorry. So I think there are a lot of makers from other media and other disciplines that are dying for your knowledge. So I think the idea that we're now in a fiscal theater is one thing. I'm not pretending, well actually I'm pretending now to be some sort of expert. So we're already in this virtual story that yours is the expert and I tell you. So this space, this theater space becomes a certain place, the place to reflect upon the role of technology and mixed reality. The real and the virtual is already blending together. So you have a lot of knowledge about this. Also it asks questions to how and I'm sorry I'm from a school or I train young people. I think we need to ask questions about what we want to educate our young talent with. Because if this is all this is sort of part of what we're designing, dramaturgy and sonography need to more and more take into account multiple audience perspectives. It's not just one room with the frontal view, right? So how are dramaturgs and sonographers trained to design and mix analog and digital spaces? Physical and virtual performance. So there's performance happening in many places. How is the actor, for example, trained to be present in multiple spaces through mediation? And then of course the whole physiological aspect. What I said about experience, reality is very much embedded in the interface of our bodies and that is a creative tool. We can manipulate that. So how do we use the physiology of perception in our designs and for our designs? Maybe we need to work together with neurologists and psychologists more. I don't know. So I asked the question in the beginning. I changed the title saying is there any future for theater? And I add to this is there any future for postmodern theater because of course we're already quite ahead when we're thinking about our own medium. I said we, that's interesting. This is what we know and we're totally comfortable with. This is what all the other industries find very problematic because all the other industries try to create the perfect illusion which means they really want to transfer a person to a certain space and that should be consistent. You should forget about the technology. You should forget almost like your body or your body should be transferred elsewhere. Here in theater we know all these multiple layers of experience can be there at the same time. Maybe not in your primary perception. You're shifting between those awarenesses. You're now looking at me. If I become silent and long enough you will become aware of each other. But it's all there at the same time. So we can be at multiple spaces in place at the same time and we understand how we can design this and we're completely relaxed about this. We're not looking anymore for the perfect illusion. We're way beyond that. Sorry for being so deterministic. You might also disagree. So to summarize, wow I'm really on time. That's good. In the question is there any future for theater? It's just a decent question. If everything will be connected to everything, internet of things, if audience become co-creators, games, transmedia, augmented reality games, all sorts of participatory theater, if audience become co-creators, if we can be at several places at the same time, not here or there but at the same time. Well, sorry for taking the very first obvious statement from theater maker but I think it's interesting because this is not only a metaphor for our way of life and how we evolve as human beings. This is a literal advice for you as theater makers. I consider through all these technologies that the world is your stage. The whole world, everything is your stage and I think that clearly I've made that point enough, I think you're the kind of storytellers that need to really start telling stories on different stages as well. I would even go as far as to say maybe you should not try to get all these technologies inside of your theater. Maybe you should bring your theater knowledge to other places and that could actually mean that you're not making theater but you're bringing your knowledge to game makers and to virtual experience builders and to all sorts of new media people and start telling stories in a different way. I think there's always a lot of talk, how do we get to new audiences? Well, maybe not by trying to get the audience in this room but to go to places where the audience are mostly having their experiences and layer that so we're not stuck with these dragons and robots all the time. Thank you very much. Just a final remark, I'll be in the lounge I think in about 15 minutes or so if you need to go elsewhere you're most welcome but I'll probably have some coffee and getting some air but if you like to talk to me you're most welcome or send me an email and see if we can work together. Thank you very much.