The Tempest in VR: Ticketed theater is heading to headsets

There is only one theater in the desert. There is a big sign: THE TEMPEST. Tickets are available. I pass the box office and enter the lobby. There is an empty bar and abandoned snacks. Crabs crawl on piles of sand. And slowly my fellow audience arrive. We are all silent, masked spirits. And then the lobby disappears and our show begins.

I suddenly stand in front of an old house in the Hollywood Hills, where a man in front of a campfire tells us how he would act as an actor in front of The Tempest Corona virus Pandemic struck. Now he will occupy us to take part in the show.

I’m participating in a 40-minute immersive Tempest VR production that is produced by Oculus and Tender Claws in The Under Presents gaming slash theater app. The $ 15 ticket launches have just started for the latest experiment in our world at home: trying to find one Home to live theater in virtual reality and even in augmented reality.

I do with over Oculus Quest Headset in my home office. I don’t know who my theater colleagues are and where they come from, because in the world of The Under Presents no player can speak and no one has a face. Except for the one actor who appears with us and tells us his story.

I have spent Hours in The Under Presentswhere live actors are hired to perform in a game world with home players. Now that actors are largely unable to attend the theater that existed before the pandemic, Oculus and Tender Claws are experimenting with live ticket shows to find more opportunities for actors.

The Under Presents: Storm is not normal Shakespeare: It’s a casual and interactive interpretation. The other three viewers I’m with can search for items, run around, nod, wave their hands, and silently emote. (The performances start on July 9th and are performed for groups of six to eight viewers randomly assigned to different performing actors.) We’re kind of like a Greek VR choir that recalls reality while the actor, Prospero plays, choreographs and guides us. It is an immersive theater and expects the audience to be part of the show.

A few months ago I was asked to play a virtual choir member in another VR theater project called Pandora X. The feeling of being a masked participant was similar. What does it mean to be an audience in virtual worlds where we can roam freely? How much can we interact? And how much can we control?

The world of Tempest is made up of bright colors and flat shapes, like a 3D cartoon. This is how the app from The Under Presents feels. The art style and the sound remind me of the theatrical indie game. Kentucky Route Zero. Virtual reality cannot make human faces easy, and instead of trying, this production makes everything look like cartoon avatars. The effect works mostly, but the feel sometimes feels like a video game. Sometimes I have to remember that the actor in front of me is a real living person, a real actor somewhere else (Terence Leclere, one of 11 actors working on the production whose real face I can’t see, but I can hear) and see embodied in a burly actor avatar).

I tried VR escape rooms where four people get together with a VR actor, and this is a similar idea. Think of the host as a kind of dungeon master who can summon objects, transport players to new locations, or weave a story together. We became the pieces that made his story a reality.

I was once manned as a ship’s captain. I helped celebrate one wedding in another. I was under the ocean and saw a huge ghost speaking. I nodded my head and waved my arms a lot. Being a silent participant was sometimes strange, and sometimes I wanted to be more invisible, wander freely, and watch with the detached feeling I had in an immersive theater like Sleep No More or Then she fell. For me, immersive theater is an experience of creative submission. Tempest gave me a more direct interaction than that, but it’s not meant to speak or improvise the show.

The $ 15 ticket is more reasonable than the $ 25 to $ 100 prices I’ve seen for other online and virtual live games and performances, and it also gives you free access to The Under Presents’ vast game world. (Another multi-adapter experience in The Under, Timeboat, is now sold as an additional $ 12 add-on, which changes the price of the original app.) The length of Tempest is also perfect. After spending too much time in VR, I can get fidgety and tired.

At the end of our trip we get a souvenir of our experience. I’m not going to share what it is, but it reminded me of similar haunting theater experiences that I had in real spaces: taking an object or letter home. The virtual souvenir somehow felt important.

Storm sometimes feels like a game. Sometimes it feels like theater. Sometimes it feels like a choreographed, bespoke version of the multiplayer things that are already in social apps like AltSpace VR and VRChat. It’s experiments like this that I hope will continue in VR: collaborative, artistic. It won’t be the last.