theater

"Holojam in Wonderland" is the world's first ever collocated theater piece for multiple actors and multiple audience members to take place entirely in shared untethered Virtual Reality. All performers and audience members are physically in the same room, able to free to walk around in that room and touch each other, yet they all see each other as avatars in a shared virtual world.

The research that went into this project, led by Ph.D. students Connor DeFanti and Zhenyi He, included low latency multi-participant tracking, synchronization of computer graphics with immersive 3D audio, and VR / AR collocation technology from our lab's spin-off company, Holjam Inc. The result is a new form of shared experience, combining the immediacy of live theater with the magical possibilities of shared virtual reality.

TXTual Healing was created in the early days of 2006 by Paul Notzold and has become an ongoing exploration in how mobile technology can transform public action into theater. Using a laptop and projector, speech balloons and/or graphic context are projected onto buildings, with a phone number to which anyone with a mobile phone can text a response. Typically a private form of communication, in this project text messaging becomes an open, anonymous, and uncensored dialogue; a means to engage, rather than to escape. A way to create community through spontaneous performance.

TXTual Healing contextualizes text messaging into user generated story telling, whether in public space or as an indoor installation. Projects include displaying text messages in speech bubbles pairing them with graphic content, writing messages out in the hand of graffiti artists, interactive movies where the audience text’s the dialog and triggers the movie to play forward, mixed media pieces using permanent graphics with projected messages, and live performance pieces such as freestyle rapping your text messages.

(Source: http://www.txtualhealing.com/ About Page)