Virtual reality performance has emerged as a canonical medium for storytelling and experiential theatre. Samuel Beckett’s Not I (1972) radically reduces theatrical form to a disembodied mouth, demanding an intense and often uncomfortable focus from its audience. Drawing on practice-based research and theories of immersive audience engagement, we explore how virtual reality can be used to reinterpret and re-stage historical theatrical works. This production examines the relationship between Beckett’s subtractive dramaturgy and the inherently additive nature of real-time rendering, motion capture, and spatial audio using modern techniques. By translating Not I into a single-user VR theatre experience, the work interrogates questions of presence, immersion, and embodiment. Not I VR positions virtual reality not as an enhancement of theatrical spectacle, but rather a critical medium for reconfiguring minimalism, embodiment, and audience confrontation within an immersive performance.

Music videos are short films that integrate songs and imagery produced for artistic and promotional purposes. Modern music videos apply various media capture techniques and creative postproduction technologies to provide a myriad of stimulating and artistic approaches to audience entertainment and engagement for viewing across multiple devices. Within this domain, volumetric video capture technologies (Figure 2) have become an emerging means of recording and reproducing musical performances for new audiences to access via traditional 2D screens and emergent extended reality platforms, such as augmented and virtual reality. These 3D digital reproductions of musical performances are captured live and are enhanced to deliver cutting-edge audiovisual entertainment (Figure 1). However, the precise impact of volumetric video in music video entertainment is still in a state of flux.

This demo paper proposes to exhibit the pilot episode of XR Ulysses, a creative project investigating the possibilities for live performance using three-dimensional volumetric video (VV) techniques via virtual reality (VR) technologies. XR Ulysses is part of a series of innovative performance experiments hybridizing theatre and extended reality (XR) technologies. Conference attendees are invited to don an HMD, embody the character of Stephen Dedalus, and engage Buck Mulligan in the famous opening scene of Joyce’s book, situated on the top of the Martello Tower at Sandycove (Dublin). This scene enables individuals to experience a live-action re-enactment of James Joyce’s Ulysses in VR.

Music videos are short films that integrate songs and imagery and are produced for artistic and promotional purposes. Modern music videos apply various media capture techniques and creative postproduction technologies to provide a myriad of stimulating and artistic approaches to audience entertainment and engagement for viewing across multiple devices. Within this domain, volumetric technologies are becoming a popular means of recording and reproducing musical performances for new audiences to access via traditional 2D screens and emergent virtual reality platforms. However, the precise impact of volumetric video in virtual reality music video entertainment has yet to be fully explored from a user’s perspective. Here we show how users responded to volumetric representations of music performance in virtual reality. Our results preliminarily demonstrate how audiences are likely to respond to music videos and offer insight into how future music videos may be developed for different user types. We anticipate our essay as a formative starting point for more sophisticated, interactive music videos that can be accessed and presented via extended-reality technologies.

Virtual reality (VR) technology presents users with virtual environments to experience various interactive, immersive, and imaginary experiences. While traditional perspective-taking exercises rely on the participant to imagine a self-other merging process to feel connected with other people (typically using second and third-person narrative perspectives), VR can allow an individual to embody an other through first-person narratives delivered via multimodal – visual, aural, haptic – technology-mediated experiences. This process enables users to perceptually and effectively portal into somebody else's body, where they can potentially see, hear, and feel from the point of view of the protagonist and control choices on their behalf in real-time. This article explores the use of VR as an ‘empathy-making machine’ by facilitating perspective-taking and allowing users to experience another person's circumstances. An experiment was performed to compare two different types of perspective-taking VR applications. Levels of empathy, oneness, and attitudes towards a protagonist or focus group within VR materials were captured. Participants then identified the elements of the VR content that contributed to a quality experience. These measures were used to discuss methodologies and techniques for creating quality empathy-building techniques. The findings of this research will be used to inform future creative technology projects presented in VR.