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Control and Being Controlled: Exploring the use of Technology in an Immersive Theatre Performance

Published:10 June 2017Publication History

ABSTRACT

Immersive theatre is a growing trend within theatre entertainment: audience members can now wander around performances and choose how the story unfolds in front of them. Technology can be used to create novel, multi-modal experiences for audiences in these performances; but when the rules of such an experience are ill-defined, how do users react to this technology? We present an evaluation of 25 performances of an immersive, in the dark performance. Issues of control can arise in situations where technology becomes an important part of such a performance. Participants take and relinquish control in three key areas: navigation, exploration and attention during the performance, and this affects their perception of both technology and the piece itself. We discuss how technology can play a positive role in immersive theatre and other cultural settings, yet its use must be carefully choreographed to ensure the audience experience matches the intended goal.

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM Conferences
      DIS '17: Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems
      June 2017
      1444 pages
      ISBN:9781450349222
      DOI:10.1145/3064663

      Copyright © 2017 ACM

      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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      Publication History

      • Published: 10 June 2017

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      DIS '17 Paper Acceptance Rate107of487submissions,22%Overall Acceptance Rate1,158of4,684submissions,25%

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