“Remote Theatrical Immersion: Extending Sleep No More” by MIT Media Lab’s Opera of the Future group and Punchdrunk (2012)

“Remote Theatrical Immersion” was an experimental collaboration between MIT Media Lab and Punchdrunk to explore ways to make the experience of an audience member at a show like “Sleep No More” more uniquely affected by their actions. Although audience members attending a performance of “Sleep No More” are free to move through the space however they wish, there is relatively little direct interaction between audience and performers. However, in this experiment, two audience members would be set up to collaborate with each other throughout the performance without being able to physically interact – one exploring the space with a mask augmented to track their location, the other navigating a web-based computer game reinterpretation of the show. As each audience member explored, they would be able to encounter and communicate with either other via “portals”, such as a typewriter that would deliver keystrokes between them, or audio passed directly to the live player via bone conduction headset.

The experiment was a limited engagement for a limited public, but I’ve heard that Media Lab and Punchdrunk are exploring not incorporating these ideas into the standard “Sleep No More” performances, but rather developing a whole new piece around it.

Remote Theatrical Immersion: Extending Sleep No More | Opera of the Future | MIT Media Lab