A Citywide Mixed Reality Performance: Initial Findings

Introduction Citywide is the provisional title for a new mixed reality performance that will be experienced by people as they move around a physical city. Set within the backdrop of two cities, one real world and the other its virtual equivalent, the performance investigates ways in which people within the physical can become aware of, and then drawn into events that are taking place within the digital. The piece unfolds gradually, with participants at first only experiencing occasional glimpses of the parallel virtual city, but eventually being able to cross between the physical and digital at will, in order to participate in a number of orchestrated events. Citywide will build upon previous mixed reality experiences such as Desert Rain [1], providing new insights into the technical and social issues involved in staging complex real-time mixed reality events. In order to support projects such as Citywide we are currently developing a new technical platform for large-scale mixed reality performances, games and other events. Large-scale within this context suggests that events can be extended in both space and time, for example a performance can span a city and unfold over several days or weeks. This paper demonstrates one particular use for such a platform, a suite of wireless applications that allow people within the physical city to locate and then tune into scenes that are taking place in an overlaid 3D virtual representation. In contrast to most augmented reality systems that aim to provide a precise and visually intensive overlay of the virtual onto the physical, the approach here is one of allowing participants to actively seek out and gradually reveal hidden virtual activity. To help demonstrate some of the concepts for Citywide, we introduce an initial “supernatural” theme for our work. Here, one can think of our participants as being “ghost-hunters” and of our devices as being tools for locating paranormal activity in parallel virtual worlds. As well as uncovering techniques for ghost-hunters to interface with the virtual, we describe interfaces for performers to monitor the locations of real world participants and enter the virtual city in order to enact scenes for them to detect. These “haunting” interfaces might potentially allow virtual avatars to exert a physical presence (through the use of actuators placed within the real world) thus allowing two-way bridging across boundaries.