This week we will be publicly premiering a theater piece in which the actors appear as digital avatars. It’s all live performance, with actors and audience members in the same room and in their actual positions. But everything is seen digitally.<\/p>\n
Looking at this one way, each actor is a puppeteering digital puppet, which just happens to be the same size and in the same location as the actor herself. Looked at another way, the actor is simply wearing an elaborate digital costume.<\/p>\n
So it seems that performance in VR raises some interesting definitional questions. For example, what is the boundary between puppetry and costume?<\/p>\n
This is certainly not an entirely new question. After all, when Sweetums<\/i> first showed up in Jim Henson’s The Frog Prince<\/i> in 1971, many children were undoubtedly asking themselves the same question: Is that a puppet like Kermit, or is that a guy in a costume like the Cowardly Lion?<\/p>\n
Virtual Reality theater ups the game a bit, because the “costume” in question can take on surreal qualities. Take for example, a VR performer dressed up in a digital ostrich costume. Unlike such a costume in the physical world, in VR the character’s knees can bend backwards.<\/p>\n
Maybe there is no good answer here. We might need to come up with a different vocabulary to discuss the relatively new realm of VR theater.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This week we will be publicly premiering a theater piece in which the actors appear as digital avatars. It’s all live performance, with actors and audience members in the same room and in their actual positions. But everything is seen digitally. Looking at this one way, each actor is a puppeteering digital puppet, which just … Continue reading “VR costume or VR puppet?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19244"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19244"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19245,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19244\/revisions\/19245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}