The latest social VR technologies have enabled users to attend traditional media and arts performances together while being geographically removed, making such experiences accessible despite budget, distance, and other restrictions. In this work, we aim at improving the way remote performances are shared by designing and evaluating a VR theatre lobby which serves as a space for users to gather, interact, and relive the common experience of watching a virtual opera. We conducted an initial test with experts ($\mathrm{N}=10$, i.e., designers and opera enthusiasts) in pairs using our VR lobby prototype, developed based on the theoretical lobby design concept. A unique aspect of our experience is its highly realistic representation of users in the virtual space. The test results guided refinements to the VR lobby structure and implementation, aiming to improve the user experience and align it more closely with the social VR lobby's intended purpose. With the enhanced prototype, we ran a between-subject controlled study ($\mathrm{N}=40$) to compare the user experience in the social VR lobby between individuals and paired participants. To do so, we designed and validated a questionnaire to measure the user experience in the VR lobby. Results of our mixed-methods analysis, including interviews, questionnaire results, and user behavior, reveal the strength of our social VR lobby in connecting with other users, consuming the opera in a deeper manner, and exploring new possibilities beyond what is common in real life. All supplemental materials are available at https://github.com/cwi-dis/IEEEVR2024-VRLobby.

Several social VR platforms support virtual entertainment events, however their value for post-show activities remains unclear. Through a user-centered approach, we design a social VR lobby experience to enrich four motivations of theatre-goers: social, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual engagement. We ran a context-mapping focus group session with professionals (N=6) to conceptualize the social VR space for digital opera experiences. Based on our findings, we propose a social VR lobby consisting of four rooms: 1) a Bar for social engagement, 2) an Info Booth for intellectual engagement, 3) a Photo Zone for emotional engagement, and 4) an Interactive Stage for spiritual engagement. Based on this work, we plan to experimentally evaluate audience experiences in each room in order to create a social VR lobby template for theater experiences.

This work presents the Co-Creation Space, a multilingual platform for professional and community artists to 1) generate raw artistic ideas, and 2) discuss and reflect on the shared meaning of those ideas. The paper describes the architecture and the technology behind the platform, and how it was used to facilitate the communication process during several user trials. By supporting ideation sessions around media items guided by a facilitator and allowing users to express themselves and be part of the creation of an artistic product, participants were enabled to access new cultural spaces and be part of the creative process.

Live streaming sites such as Twitch offer new ways for remote audiences to engage with and affect gameplay. While research has considered how audiences interact with games, HCI lacks clear demarcations of the potential design spaces for audience participation. This paper introduces and validates a theme map of audience participation in game live streaming for student designers. This map is a lens that reveals relationships among themes and sub-themes of Agency, Pacing, and Community—to explore, reflect upon, describe, and make sense of emerging, complex design spaces. We are the first to articulate such a lens, and to provide a reflective tool to support future research and education. To create the map, we perform a thematic analysis of design process documents of a course on audience participation for Twitch, using this analysis to visually coordinate relationships between important themes. To help student designers analyze and reflect on existing experiences, we supplement the theme map with a set of mapping procedures. We validate the applicability of our map with a second set of student designers, who found the map useful as a comparative and reflective tool.

In recent years, artists and communities have expressed the desire to work with tools that facilitate co-creation and allow distributed community performances. These performances can be spread over several physical stages, connecting them on real-time towards a single experience with the audience distributed along them. This enables a wider remote audience consuming the performance through their own devices, and even grants the participation of remote users in the show. In this paper we introduce the Co-creation Stage, a web-based tool that allows managing heterogeneous content sources, with a particular focus on live and on-demand media, across several distributed devices. The Co-creation Stage is part of the toolset developed in the Traction H2020 project which enables community performing art shows, where professional artists and non-professional participants perform together from different stages and locations. Here we present the design process, the architecture and the main functionalities of the tool as well as the results of the first user evaluation with Opera houses and artists.

Opera is a historic art that struggles to be approachable to modern audiences. In partnership with the Irish National Opera (INO), this work considers how VR may be used to develop a new form of immersive opera. To this end, we ran three open-ended focus groups to consider how creative, multisensory, and social VR technology may be employed in digital opera. Our findings assert the importance of creating an immersive experience by safely giving audiences agency to interact, to democratize personal and social experiences, and to consider different ways of representing their bodies, their social rituals, and the virtual social space. Using these findings, we envision a new form of VR opera that couples physical traditions with digital affordances.