All the World's a Stage: Volumetric AR and the New Power of Representation
Placing poet, Dizfa Benson, outside the Duke of York Theatre
For fifteen years, my practice has been rooted in narrative environment design. It's a field built on a deep curiosity about the relationship between a storyteller, the story they tell, the audience they’re telling it to, as well as how and where that story is told. This work, which involves curating and integrating people's voices into immersive and interactive storytelling spaces, always comes back to one central idea: context is king.
Today, there are two technologies – volumetric video (VolCap) and smartphone-based Augmented Reality (AR) – that we are combining to supercharge this idea. They give us a new, incredibly powerful way to explore representation in our cultural and heritage spaces by fulfilling a deceptively simple brief: "putting real people in real places telling real stories."
With our platform, OPUS, we’ve been inspired by Shakespeare’s prescient words, "All the world's a stage." We're making it possible to put anyone, anywhere, anytime – to occupy any physical space with a 3D digital human, a true-to-life hologram, delivering a unique story, insight or performance.
This isn't a flat video on a screen; it's the virtual presence of a real person, standing with you, in your world. This capability creates a new and dynamic set of relationships, a framework we can use to design experiences:
Performance : Place : Purpose
These three "lenses" can be explored and adjusted to create an almost unlimited number of ways to experience a place and play with what it means. The Performance (who is speaking and what they say) is no longer fixed. Its meaning is radically altered by the Place it's in and the Purpose for which it was put there. You can start with any one of these lenses and explore how drilling down into it starts to reshape and recontextualise the other two.
Martin Wright delivers For The Fallen at Thame War Memorial
Let's take a powerful example. One of our earliest prototypes was a volumetric performance of the actor Martin Wright delivering Laurence Binyon's famous WWI poem, For the Fallen.
Scenario 1: The Obvious
The obvious context is to place this performance by a war memorial for November 11th. The Place (memorial) and Purpose (remembrance) are in perfect alignment with the Performance (the poem). The line, "They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old," here carries exactly the meaning we expect.
Scenario 2: The Educational
You could also take this same performance and place it in a classroom. The Purpose shifts to education. A history student can better understand the emotional context of the war, or an English student can see literature brought to life on the page. The performance becomes a living text.
Scenario 3: The Radical
Now, let's take that exact same Performance and change the Place entirely. What happens if you placed it at the site of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, for example?
Suddenly, the Purpose is shattered and rebuilt. The poem's entire meaning shifts. The "people" you are remembering are different. The "war" they were fighting – for safety, for recognition, for justice – is different.
When you hear "Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn," the line takes on a new, chilling, and enduringly tragic power. The context of the Place has completely re-wired the meaning of the Performance, creating space for new ways of remembering and engaging with this site of national tragedy.
This is the incredible role of interpretive planning and narrative environment design, and the potential that we’re now taking to the next stage (pun intended) with OPUS. The combination of volumetric video and location-based AR can transform any place into an immersive stage, a platform for encountering new voices in new ways and unexpected places. It allows for new types of placemaking and place-based interaction that can fundamentally change how we think, feel, and act in the world – and about the people we "meet" there.
In a time of major social and cultural upheaval, we’re exploring how to move these technologies beyond “just a gimmick” into the realm of the meaningful. It is a radical new approach to representation and recording tangible and intangible cultural heritage. It's a way to use technology to give voice to the stories and experiences of real people, in the exact places where those stories can have the most relevance, meaning, and impact.