Virtual Theatre
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[edit] Virtual Theatre
The Applications in Virtual Theatre project, led by Joe Geigel, is a fairly successful attempt at creating a program that will allow actors, directors and tech people from around the world work together to put together working live virtual theatrical performances that anyone can watch. The project was begun in classes offered by the RIT Computer Science department, that included both graduate and undergraduate students working together. The idea was that if you took a computer gaming engine as a basis for the virtual world and actors(what the gaming world knows as avatars), and hacked the game engine to work with input from Motion Capture equiptment (MoCap), you could create a virtual stage, and use motion capture suits to input the actions of a live actor in the real world and make the virtual actor do the corresponding action. A number of gaming engines were tried, until it was decided upon to use the Torque gaming engine. As the project moved onward the efforts were typically divided into 5 teams, Staging, Networking, Audience, MoCap and Puppet.
[edit] Staging
For staging, it was mostly a focus on how to make the game engine work into what would be necessary to put on a performance, mainly the technical side of theater. Added to the program were a lighting manager, a cue creator and a cue manager,. The lighting manager allowed for someone to create light points (with specific colors) and position them as needed to light the virtual actors and create light cues that would be accessed by the cue manager. The cue creator allowed someone to create sound and action cues that the cue manager would access. The cue manager, kept track of the cues that were created and allowed the 'stage manager' of the performance to activate whatever cue was necessary at a certain point.
Another big contention for the staging team was the necessity to communicate between sites, for instance to find out if an actor was hooked up and ready to be added to the stage. With no A/V communication set up within the game engine it was a new problem, but what was found to manage that need was the AccessGrid.
