Hello World: Liveness in Virtual Theatre for the Metaverse

Understanding what audiences want in a new sector of live virtual events requires open and collaborative sharing of projects and work. As the virtual theatre and metaverse live events sectors establish themselves, we need to better understand whether audiences need or want live performance to create better connection to the performance, the story, and the other audience members. This project, produced by Copper Candle as part of Innovate UKs Audience of the Future programme, is a highly technical development of a new live theatre platform which utilises state-of-the-art motion capture live streaming and Unreal Engine game applications for audiences. The project produced a piece of live theatre with research mechanisms built in which allowed the team to understand what an audience wants from this format of entertainment. The findings of the production can identify directions for producers to take forward in their future works.