We secured IUK Creative Catalyst funding to explore and prototype what a new form of location-based volumetric performance could be – working with Jette Parker at the Royal Opera House and a group of independent artists to capture performances, develop the first iteration of the OPUS app platform, and test the experience with real audiences in real public locations.

The ambition was not to replicate existing performance in a digital format but to pose a novel and open question: what becomes possible when a live human performance is captured in four dimensions and placed back into the world, anywhere, at any scale? IUK described it as “…a new art form at the crossroads of future performing arts and technology.”

R&D Direction | Narrative Development | Creative Direction | Performance Capture | AR Platform Development | Audience Testing

Working with Jette Parker at the Royal Opera House and independent artists, actors and poets – Martin Wright, Paul Sockett, Jeremiah Brown, Zach Woods, Dzifa Benson, K'antu, Anna Maria Burduli, and WomanEwer – a deliberately diverse group spanning spoken word, poetry, music and movement, we developed and captured a first series of volumetric performances at Condense Reality's studio in Bristol.

The capture process produced four-dimensional recordings of real human performances: not filmed from a single angle but captured in full three-dimensional space, allowing the resulting digital presences to be scaled, placed and encountered from any direction in any real-world location.

We developed the prototype OPUS app platform with Animorf – building the technical architecture for hosting, locating and delivering volumetric performances through a smartphone interface, placing them in specific locations using augmented reality.

We developed five OPUS Stage locations between Covent Garden and Trafalgar Square – chosen for their footfall, their cultural associations and the contrast between the intimate human scale of the performances and the grand public spaces surrounding them.

Testing with audiences at these locations gave us our first evidence of what the encounter between a volumetric performance and a real-world site actually produces in a person standing in front of it.

The most important finding from this phase was also the most human: the performance changed the place, and the place changed the performance.

In one of the most heavily trafficked areas of London, people paused, leaned in, walked around the performers, and stayed longer than any conventional street performance would have held them. The volumetric presence – a real person, captured in three dimensions, existing at human scale in a public space – produced a quality of attention that the team had hypothesised but had not been certain would materialise.

The diversity of the artist group was not incidental – it was a founding principle. A new form of performance needs to demonstrate from the outset that it belongs to the full range of human expression, not to a single genre or tradition.

Poetry, movement, music and spoken word each made different demands of the technology and produced different qualities of experience. That range was essential research.

The prototype also surfaced the question that has driven every subsequent phase of the project: what is the relationship between the performance and the place? The same volumetric piece placed in Covent Garden and placed by a village war memorial produces entirely different experiences – and understanding why, and how to design for that difference, is one of the most interesting open questions in the field.

Client: Self-initiated – funded by Creative Catalyst (Innovate UK)

TGA: R&D Direction, Narrative Development, Performance Capture Direction, Audience Testing

Artists: Royal Opera House’s Jette Parker, Ryan Vaughan Davies, Martin Wright, Paul Sockett, Jeremiah Brown, Zach Woods, Dzifa Benson, K'antu, Ana Maria Burduli, WomanEwer

Partners: Four Door Productions (Immersive Consultant), Condense Reality (Volumetric Capture Studio, Bristol), Animorf (MVP App Development)