is the knowledge-sharing platform for the 

. Explore the experiments and bold ideas behind the Academy's Fellowship programme, delve into the science behind the projects of our HIDA researchers, and explore the results of international collaborations.

is a platform for discovery and documentation. Each 

showcases a unique artistic-technological research project, with topics as diverse as the use of AI in theatrical design, choreography for and with robotics, and the possibilities for theatre in virtual spaces. Each 

 offers the chance to learn more about the members of our artistic research network. By pooling our knowledge in such a way, creative research into theatre, performance and digital technologies can become more accessible, sustainable, and artistically innovative.

Funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation, the Academy will award a total of 54 fellowships between 2019 and 2022, each lasting for five months. The 

 are designed for people interested in artistic-technical research which explores the possibilities for digital narratives in theatrical spaces, as well as their practical implementation. Fellows have researched a variety of digital methods (motion capture, coding, XR, VR, AR, sensor technologies, robotics, and more) across artistic fields including opera, dance, orchestra and drama. 

Helmholtz Information & Data Science Academy

(HIDA), the Academy for Theatre and Digitality has offered joint research fellowships at the interface of digital art and cutting edge scientific research since 2021. The HIDA fellowships are kindly supported by the 

PlayOn! New Storytelling With Immersive Technologies

 is a larger scale cooperation project, funded by Creative Europe, designed to understand, learn, test and apply immersive technology to theatre, in order to shift classical storytelling to interactive narrative formats.

Artificial Intelligence

VR (Virtual Reality)

Interactive

Sound Design

Projection/Mapping

3D Printing

XR (Extended Reality)

AV (Audiovisual Design)

Theater Dortmund
Theater Karree 1-3
44137 Dortmund
Germany
Fon: +49 (0) 231 226 14330

Address and location of the Academy for Theater and Digitality:
Speicherstrasse 17
44147 Dortmund
Germany

E-Mail: akademie@theater.digital
Web: theater.digital

Tax number: 314/5702/9367
Sales tax identification number: DE 124643894

Management Team:

Executive Director
Tobias Ehinger

Administrative Director
Martin Lizan

Director of the Opera
Heribert Germeshausen

Director of the Ballet
Xin Peng Wang

General Music Director
Gabriel Feltz

Artistic Director of the Schauspiel
Julia Wissert

Director of the Children's and Youth Theater
Andreas Gruhn

Director of the Academy for Theatre and Digitality
Marcus Lobbes

Please also note our privacy policy.

 as the sixth division of Theater Dortmund (hereinafter referred to as "Theater", information about Theater Dortmund can be found 

), is pleased that you are visiting our website. Data protection and data security when using our website are very important to us. We would therefore like to inform you at this point, in accordance with Article 13 of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (DSGVO) and Section 13 of the German Telemedia Act (TMG), which of your personal data we collect when you visit our website and for what purposes it is used. Since changes in the law or changes in our internal company processes may make it necessary to adapt this data protection declaration, we ask you to read through this data protection declaration regularly. The data protection declaration can be accessed, saved and printed out here at any time.


§ 1 Scope of application

This data protection declaration applies to the Internet offering of Theater Dortmund, which can be accessed under the domain www.theaterdo.de and the various subdomains (hereinafter referred to as "our website").


§ 2 What is personal data?

Personal data is individual information about personal or factual circumstances of a specific or identifiable natural person (data subject). This includes, for example, information such as your name, address, telephone number, date of birth or e-mail address. Information for which we cannot establish a reference to your person, e.g. by anonymizing the information, is not personal data.


§ 3 What personal data do we collect/process and use?

Access data without personal reference is stored, such as the name of your Internet service provider, the page from which you visit us, the names of the requested files and their retrieval date. These data are evaluated exclusively for the improvement of our offer and do not allow any conclusions to be drawn about your person. 

If you wish to make use of services offered by us on our website, such as purchasing tickets via the ticket store or ordering a newsletter, etc., it is necessary for you to provide further data. This is the data that is required for the respective processing, such as your payment information when purchasing tickets or your e-mail address when ordering a newsletter. 

We process the data we collect about you for the provision of the services we offer, to answer your questions and to operate and improve our website and applications. 

We process your personal data exclusively to provide you with a comprehensive service via our website or, if you use our contact form or, to process your ticket purchase or, to process your application or, to provide you with requested information about our offers.

Fellowship

HIDA

PlayOn!

discover cutting-edge digital research in theatre and performance 
meet our research fellows and collaborators in the 

Portal: Academy for Theatre and Digitality

Christine Härter grew up in Stuttgart, Germany. She studied at the Universities of Siegen and Tübingen and graduated as MA in Literary and Cultural Theory. At the Zimmertheater Tübingen and the Staatstheater Stuttgart she had her first internships in professional theatre. Form 2013 on, she worked as an assistant director at the Badische Landesbühne Bruchsal, where she also directed 

 by Christa Wolf in 2016, and at the Stadttheater Gießen. From 2017 on she has occasionally been working as a dramaturg and just started in the late autumn of 2019 in this position at the young theatre department (Junges Theater) at the Landestheater Linz, Austria.

Website

Christine Härter

We wanted to make a participatory game that created a world in which the audience had an assigned role and the story would unfold because they took part in it.

The idea of the theme of “coup” came with a small situation in which an audience member thinks “I can change this, I know how it could be better”, that can take place in everyday work life.

What technology was the focus of the work, and why?


Bone-conducting headphones leave audience members free to hear their surroundings and the actors while being guided by an “inner voice”. LORA network, to have a wide coverage of space (one antenna instead of multiple wlan-routers).

What did you hope to explore in terms of technology, form, and content?


Each audience member should have a very singular, individual experience. There should be a plethora of tasks and stories to experience on their way to disappointment and the coup, to have them experience the office on their own. Quests (and their accompanying audio files) should be triggered either by actors, giving them a task, or by being inside a certain area.

How did the collaborators work together on this project?


Landestheater Linz teamed up with Das Planetenparty Prinzip who, with Simon Windisch, have experience in the making of large and world building games. Together we developed the idea, cast amateur members and rehearsed. 

Planetenparty Prinzip and set designer Andrea Meschik and the team around software and hardware development built the technical hard- and software as well as parts of the set, while other set parts were built in Landestheater Linz workshops or supplied from their storage.

Das Planetenparty Prinzip mainly developed the text of the game, Landestheater Linz supported dramaturgically. Since Das Planetenparty Prinzip worked for a long time in Graz and Landestheater Linz was situated in Linz, from both groups a good amount of project management and communication was necessary, as well as visits to each other’s workspaces.

The tricky part of the technical set up was that it could only be tested if everything was there and plugged in.

When we were finally in our performance space and set up our equipment, set design and actors, we quickly tried to do test runs, because the time until the premiere was short.

AdaptorX (https://docs.adaptorex.org) served as inspiration, but the program used was written by the software team. In the early planning stage, bone-conducting headphones were available, but had gone from the market when we were ready to compile our outfits, so the headphones had to be assembled manually.

Did any of your questions or goals change, over the course of this project?


In the first draft, we wanted to build an autonomous office space with many single cubicles. This then morphed into the idea of working in an actual office, as finding an empty office was as tricky as finding one “in use”, but which already had typical office architecture.

Additional to the headphones and ties, radio sets were set in every office. They should have been triggered by a LORA signal as well to play specific sounds/volumes at a certain moment – this did not work.

Also, the headsets did not always work as reliably as needed (or the audience members proved not as compliant with the "inner voice"), so certain fail safes had to be established in order for people not to fall out of the game in these cases. Everything that did not work technically had to be substituted by persons.

What were the key milestones in the development of the production?


Finding a performance space was difficult, as it should be played in an office where people actually worked while the game was taking place. When the Department of Culture of Upper Austria offered their building, we were more than happy!

Dramaturgically it was quite tricky to construct the development of the game – what do they hear when, how many tasks do they need to learn something about this world. When the first draft of “beginning, crisis, trust, tasks, disappointment and coup recruitment” was developed, we had a much clearer path.

Technically, the first time everything was plugged in and it worked was a key milestone. The final milestone was probably the premiere, as there were still some important changes after the general rehearsal.

What was the final outcome of the project, and how does it compare to any expectations at the start?


The project was a success. It needed more personnel than expected, where technical difficulties arose.

In what ways was the production a success?


Audience members had a lot of fun, found their way through the story and were invested in their role.

Co-producing partners learned a lot from each other and from the project.

The technical setup was developed mainly from scratch and is now working and can be used for further projects.

Landestheater Linz now uses bone conducting headphones in their sound department, e.g. for audio descriptions.

What elements of the final production would you change?


Depending on where such a play is performed, whether using LORA (which has a bit of a delay) or W-LAN should be considered.

If other people were to take a similar approach, what advice would you give?


Preparation time on site, where everything can be tested, is the most precious asset – it should be as long as possible.

The code for this project is open-source: 

Team

Nele Neitzke

Putsch is an interactive game that explores the alienation process of office life and the temptation of radical thought. The audience members are led through an intern office experience by actors (co-workers, superiors, played by actors both professional and amateur) and an “inner voice" that is enabled via radio triggers and bone-conducting headphones and hidden in an office tie. Audience members are led to believe, that they could change things for the better, fulfil quests and file suggestions into a “Feedback Friend”. But to their disappointment, all feedback turns out to be futile. When the idea of a coup is given, they are enticed to participate. 
The play takes place in an actual office, in which people are doing their real-life work during the performance. 
___________________________________________________________
A Landestheater Linz and Das Planetenparty Prinzip production as part of the Creative Europe project PlayOn! in collaboration with SCHÄXPIR Linz and La Strada Graz

Putsch

Game Design

Landestheater Linz

What questions did you have at the start of this project?


How can we open up the theatre to the audience and give an insight behind the scenes without having to enter the building in a both educational and artistic way?
Can we use an app to bring the creation of a play closer to the audience?
Is it possible to present all the trades digitally and make them tangible?
How to create a theatrical experience in a city area?

In order to open the theatre digitally from the outside, a solution had to be found that could be used by an audience of around 400 people at the same time without great effort. It was therefore decided to rely on augmented reality, which can be easily implemented on a smartphone using an app.

To ensure that the outdoor experience was not limited to a single point, several points in the city were defined that could be explored using geo-tagging. In addition, the solution had to be sustainable so that it could still be used in the future.

We wanted to create an app or a web-based solution that we could expand as required, especially with regard to creative content.

The framework and ideas for the content and the form came from the theatre and the digital artists in close cooperation. This took place in personal discussions, meetings and test runs.

The app solution soon turned out to be too cost-intensive and could not be implemented due to data protection concerns regarding our young audiences.

The geo-tagging for the respective stations within the old town in particular was often a trial-and-error process.

For the map used in the game to navigate to the different locations and the basis tool, we used 8th Wall by Niantic.

Definitely. Switching from the app to a web-based solution was the biggest change. There were also changes to the content that had to do with the scope of the original idea.

The decision in favour of the web-based solution and the first stable test runs.

The end result was a (more or less) stable online game that up to 200 people could play at the same time. The augmented reality elements ran smoothly and provided a nice insight into the creation of a stageplay. We were able to reach the target audience very well with the game on the smartphone.

The greatest success lay in its playability across different operating systems and smartphone-types. The barrier of entry was especially low, as there is no need to download an app, since the project is webhosted.

The usability which could be slightly more intuitive – especially in the onboarding-phase.

Decide early on whether the game should be app or web-based. This decision has great implications on what sort of interactions are possible. Then it would be good to work specifically on the respective stations for geo-tagging to ensure that the tracking quality is sufficient. Additionally, testing the prototype on a regular basis with a variety of people with different technology-savvy backgrounds is highly beneficial.

As a digital frame for our production FIRST LOVE – A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM we invented a digital scavenger hunt - “DEAR NORA: City as Backstage Area”. In this augmented reality game-experience you are living through your first day as an intern at the theatre, who is guided through different workplaces (which are in this case transposed into the inner city of Linz next to the theatre) and tasked to do little jobs, like helping a choreographer, a director or the workshops.
The game uses geotagging to guide the players through the city and it uses audio and augmented reality elements that can be interacted with. This experience allows the audience to dive deeper into our production, which merges the arts forms of the departments of opera, drama and dance and shows the “how-to” of the creation of a theatrical production.
___________________________________________________________
A Landestheater Linz production as part of the Creative Europe project PlayOn! 

Dear Nora

App/UI Design

AR (Augmented Reality)

We started during COVID lockdown and the question was simply: can we use the digital as a performance space, as the other performance spaces were closed? Everything else followed. What software works best? What do we have to take into account? What spatial needs are on our side? What technical equipment do we need? How do we invite audiences? What does the audience need to immerse themselves? Which rules of streaming do we have to follow?



We tested out MS Teams and Zoom, but found that Zoom is more universally known and had more possibilities. We wanted to create a shared room with the audience, possibly to integrate them into the play or to talk with them afterwards. 


Theatre is fundamentally live and always shares the same space and time with the actors. This is what we missed most when we watched theatre streams of past performances. The focus then was, how to work with Zoom technically, and how to act and narrate a story in this format. How we invite the audiences into this space so that they experience the liveness of the event was a tricky question: as soon as there is a screen between us, it could be a movie as well. How to convince them, that we play for them? How can we focus them on what's happening on their screen?

We had two laptops with external cameras. The third camera should be like the door camera, so we used a smartphone with a fish eye lens that was directly logged into Zoom.

We invited our colleagues to be our test audience to see if they understood our explanation of how to get onboard. 

New questions arose, but also new solutions:

Sound was a bit tricky - how near do you have to be to the microphone, as it is designed to pick up speech at a near proximity, not the surround-sound of a room. 

How many fail-safes do we need (back-up cameras/smartphones etc)? How many people need to be on standby if anything happens (internet breaks down, sudden updates, etc)? For internet stability we used additional W-LAN routers.

How to book the show? How to advertise different scenarios? You could book a package to be sent a bottle of blood-red wine, a cloth napkin and a candle to create your own set around your screen - how to offer this? How to package this?



What were the key milestones in the development of the production?


When things were running and we had our first test-audiences. Finding out that a nice little sticker next to the camera helps the actors to focus their view on the non-present audience.

The play in itself worked very well. Dramaturgically, the plot of those three isolated siblings translated well into the Zoom format. 

The audience numbers fell behind expectations. Also the analogue package with the wine and props was seldom booked. We saw that audiences craved analogue experiences after the lockdown and were a bit frustrated with life happening on Zoom - though art happening on Zoom was a good change.

Audiences gave us very good feedback and colleagues were fascinated by the possibilities that might come out of this new format. Especially fond to us was an audience discussion afterwards that was longer than the 40 minute performance...

What elements of the final production would you change?


We had difficulty finding out how the audience felt during the performance. For the actors, it was very challenging to speak to a silent machine - we thought that feedback and interaction should be expanded.


If other people were to take a similar approach, what advice would you give?

In further projects, we emphasised interaction and feedback-possibilities. This should not be neglected.

Software constantly changes and often improves - but beware updates that surprise you 10 minutes before your scheduled performance.

Elektra by Hugo von Hoffmansthal goes lockdown: Greek antiquity meets today's Zoom call. Two young women are locked in their parents' palace of Mykene: Mother Klytemnestra has remarried since she murdered her husband - daughter Chrysothemis hopes to soon marry out of captivity, daughter Elektra went insane with thoughts of grief and revenge, son Orest has been sent away. A stranger arrives to announce Orest's death, but turns out to be Orest himself, who has come to revenge his father and murder Klytemnestra. 
Audience members join via Zoom - we only see the three siblings locked in and talking to each other, horrifying each other and plotting murder. The play explores separation, family ties and the digital as immersive performance space. An additional, analogue package was offered to extend the stage into the audiences' homes.
___________________________________________________________
A Landestheater Linz production as part of the Creative Europe project PlayOn!

Elektra

The very first idea was a scavenger hunt through a district of Linz, where we could narrate with actors, found objects, and settings the story of the two teenagers. Could they maybe go into an unused flat and examine it? We then focussed the idea on two separate rooms and an exit game strategy. So the questions were practical: Where do we find two big empty rooms that we can use and how can we narrate a story through them? 

When COVID hit, letting audience groups rummage around a room suddenly did not seem like a good idea. That is why we used Zoom, a smartphone with a good camera and a gimbal, to avoid motion sickness, which we used to lead the audience remotely through a room. Zoom seemed well established, was already tested with our production of 

 and had the possibility of breakout rooms, which was not the case with e.g. Microsoft Teams back then.

The breakout rooms were used to split the audience into two groups, and, at certain points, to introduce an authority figure to increase pressure or give clues. If the audience find all clues, they unlock a video that shows how Lea is walking on ice, breaks in and is saved by Hasan. The audience is then lead back to the main session, where both groups tell each other about their side of the story and are lead into a discussion.

Originally, we wanted to explore adapting a text to a gaming structure. How can you tell a story about a person through their belongings?

The collaboration was challenged by shifting timetables and possibilities during COVID. We explored multiple platforms to work remotely with the director and dramaturg up until it was time (and possible) to actually set up the stage. 

The students divided into two groups, each focussing on one of the rooms/characters. We had talks about content and tested out gaming structures together. The game had fixed needs for it to work, everything else they could fill with life and their imagination. The task was unusual, as we needed to create not a stage but an actual environment that seemed to be rooted in reality but also told a story.

The first try-outs with the gaming structure were very sketchy (all clues were made our of paper). As the production grew, we gradually invited colleagues and audience peer groups to be our test audiences.



Did any of your questions or goals change, over the course of this project?


At a certain point, we wanted to give the characters a social media life as well, but gradually kept them more analogue, as there were unsolved questions about platform policies and the story did not really require them anymore. We realised that we need the videos to start and end the game, to introduce the audiences into the story (like a cut scene in a video game) and the world outside the rooms the play takes place in.



What were the key milestones in the development of the production?


When we figured out that we can do the game remotely - this also solved the yet undecided question about performance spaces, as we now could use two small rooms in the theatre that audiences would have never been able to access.

When things were running and we had our first test-audiences.

The game worked really well. We learned how to guide a audiences so that the gaming-experienced ones took more time to explore the room and the unexperienced ones were helped a little.

Especially pupils liked the gaming elements and the freedom they had to explore.

The game proved more intense in relation to people involved in each performance, as we had the “avatars” led by the audience, the actors that came in and kept the game pushing forward and a kind of stage master for each room, surveying and communicating to the other.

Audiences liked the interactivity and freedom they had inside the story. We found out a lot about gaming structures and online formats – how interaction is vital to the production.

The play relies heavily on improvisation from the persons with the camera and the actors interacting with the audience. Everyone has to know the game very well and be able to monitor the process.

The actual game structure is not that complicated – you had to find four clues (sometimes put them together first, translate it, etc.), to unlock the secret. If the rooms are stuffed with “fluff” and story, this is enough to entertain an audience for an hour!

Give good instructions to teachers, if school classes are your audience:– we needed two rooms with internet, PC and a projector and one person as speaker communicating with us.


Based on the short novel by Austrian writer Sophie Reyer, the audience joined a Zoom call and was split into two groups. They were shown a short video clip that introduced them to either Lea, an Austrian girl who feels lonely after the death of her mother, or to Hasan, a refugee in Austria, who feels alienated in the new country is family is now staying in. The audience are shown a group chat wondering where either Lea or Hasan is, and sends one friend into their homes. The camera switches on, and the audience see the respective room of the missing teenager. The friend has taken the audience with them, and needs their help to find the missing person. An escape room game ensues. 
___________________________________________________________
A Landestheater Linz production as part of the Creative Europe project PlayOn! in collaboration with University of Arts Linz

Expectation: First Snow

What questions did you have at the start of this project?


How can we tell a story about digitality in the digital realm? What kind of choices can we give to the audience, while we still narrate a linear story? How can we make live streaming look good?



We used OBS for streaming via Vimeo. Unreal Engine was used to build the digital worlds, in which the actor could move a digital character around. Reaction.link was used for audience interaction.


As Nikola feels alien in the real world, she tries to disappear more and more into the digital realm, into which she types all her anger and frustration. We wanted to explore what happens if we meet her there as an audience. 

She starts to correspond with a person that calls themself Mona Lisa and she becomes more and more dependent on them. They build their digital utopia together, but ultimately have to live in the real world. The play tries to merge content and form (which is in itself technological) into a unity, that follows Nikola on her way deeper into the digital realm – and out again.

Nele Neitzke and students Nils Gallist and Manuel Lattner found each other through their professor for Digital Arts, Dr Jürgen Hagler. The team developed the digital worlds that serve as a utopia and escapist dream world. How could it look like and how many variations should be included? We invited the digital artists to our rehearsals, and they showed us their progress states and different routes (you could chose between different settings).

Trial and error was tested first with in-production audiences and finally focus group audiences.

Using Vimeo as a platform brought new challenges: How to implement it into our website, how to stream via OBS? Especially finding the right level for the sound proved tricky.

The digital worlds needed a gaming PC to run smoothly. With the smaller scale Zoom-productions, everything had played out on office laptops.

Reaction.link was ideal as it works as a web app – none of the youngsters had to download or register anything. Data protection-wise, this is a very clean solution.

- Having it up and running for the first time
- Finding the right levels, sound-wise
- Deciding on reaction.link

The result looked very nice, compared to our experiences with Zoom. On the other hand, we had less feedback and knowledge about our audience on a technical level (Can they see and hear the video? Do they have problems on their end? Should we wait a minute?). Of course, we had contact possibilities for them – in Zoom, you could see more clearly if people had logged in or not. On Vimeo, you just had viewer numbers.

We gave the audience the possibility to constantly react via reaction.link and send emojis – this proved very insightful, as youngsters showed their mood via this excessively – we had over 1000 clicks in some shows. The subject was well chosen for the setting, as Nikola feels alone and isolated in the world – being also alienated from the audience gave her loneliness another layer.



What elements of the final production would you change?


For this production, the few audience choices were enough, but made us think if they also could affect the storyline.


Everything programming related takes a lot of time.

For the technical everyday questions of an online production that has much diverse input (live feed, videos, chat overlays, reaction link decisions) it is great to have someone on the team, as our director’s assistant, who is not alien to programming and streaming.



The coding for this project is open-source: 

In the adaptation from the novel by Corinna Antelmann, Nikola takes via her webcam into her world, which is currently turned upside down: Her classmates seem to be brainless zombies and her parents decided to move house – without asking her. She feels as if she’s alone in her criticism on consumerism and gender norms and has no one to share her thoughts with – therefore she dives into the internet, in search for like-minded persons and a place, a kind of utopia, where she can feel at home. 

Streaming on Vimeo, we built our stage through a live-feed webcam, vlogs, smartphone videos and a virtual gaming world to create a multi-layered universe of the real world and the virtual one. Audiences could choose how the digital utopia looked like. Who do we want to be? Does anyone feel the same way as we do? 
___________________________________________________________
A Landestheater Linz production as part of the Creative Europe project PlayOn! in collaboration with the University of Applied Sciences, Upper Austria

Alienation

What questions did you have at the start of the project?


We started with the idea to talk about school. How does school work, and could it be better? Can we enable school children to describe this institution that dominates their life and to formulate, what’s good or bad about it? 

In a broader sense: Should society form our personality / individuality / body to its needs or should it be as open as possible to allow us limitless freedom?

On the dramaturgical level, we wanted to give audiences choices that mattered. We had a very open gaming experience with 

, we wanted to let the audience have real choice, while still having a scripted story progression.

We knew ZOOM as software pretty well by then, knew how to stream from a small stage in an office room and had edited videos for 

. Our stage designer Karin Waltenberger had worked on 

, and experienced shooting videos and designing a streamable stage. From 

, we knew basically how to use OBS and inspired by 

 by theatre company meinhardt&Kraus, we gathered that OBS can be used in ZOOM as well and wanted to experiment with that ourselves. 

We knew the pitfalls of ZOOM (especially sound quality). But in the plus side, audiences were accustomed to it. If they were not, we already knew how to explain the onboarding. And it included a polling feature we wanted to employ again, after we had an idea of what we wanted to do subject-wise.

Technologically, we wanted to play with OBS and Zoom – all the feeds (live acting, sound, videos) should be fed in through one Zoom window. As for the form, we wanted to explore the possibilities of a branching narrative in a theatre context further, add an RPG element and game balancing. Therefore, we did not only have to think about choices and effects, but on how to measure these effects. And content-wise, we tried to find out, how a collective mind of an audience would form a personality through choices and how to make that entertaining.

The most important trial-and-error was possibly the first time we presented the early idea of the game to our dramaturg Nele Neitzke. The original plan was to let the audience create a RPG-like personality, based on the “Big Five” personality traits, let it run and ultimately fail a daily routine and then to be able to intervene as “consciousness” at certain points. This proved already too complicated to explain properly. After that, we turned it around: The personality was created by the choices the audience made during the daily routine.

We then developed the game further, played it through by letting choice (dice) decide the narrative path and finally did a pen-and-paper-like presentation to a new audience, where we narrated what they would ultimately see. This gave us clues, where our story had loopholes, our point system was unfair and, most importantly, that the most enjoyable part of the game was the groups discussion which path to take.

We filmed the first two sections as improvised videos to see if the media change affected the enjoyment and tested it with the youngsters that ultimately became our video cast.

We then had test audiences in the last days, after which we shortened the beginning monologue that explained the game and changed some wordings in the choices that proved misleading.

Tech-wise the biggest trial-and-error stage was sound. To get sound from OBS Videos into Zoom we implemented NDI, but it still proved shaky. Zoom tries to format sound to a ideal speaking output, which we tried to disable as much as possible. But NDI can also amplify sound or dynamically change it, as well as OBS has its own sound settings. This balancing was the most difficult one and kept being an issue. A workable solution might have been to change from Zoom to VOD.ninja, but at that stage we could not bring audiences to another platform anymore.

We used OBS where we fed in a live video feed from a webcam and audio from a wireless microphone, as well as 98 videos.

We used NDI as link between OBS and Zoom (Video worked directly from OBS to Zoom, but not sound).

For video cutting we used Davinci Resolve.

Images and the easter egg animation via GIMP.

We first focussed more on the RPG-character (PINs personality) than the status (PINs happiness, energy, ambition). We gave the audience more agency and the personality aspect became a nice to have conclusion. But these changes actually helped to further our goal of giving audiences choices that mattered.

The change from the character-driven agency to choice and status driven agency. The first playtests with pen-and-paper and with the whole session programmed and run via Zoom for the first time.

Audiences were immersed in the story (and very angry when they reached the unhappy ending where the mother is sending PIN to their room, because they came back too late and had eaten too much cake). The characters that were formed were never complete opposites, in five categories they usually fell in two of three options, which might be due to the communal nature of the game and the goal of balancing “ambition” (there was no selfish, carefree or introverted version of PIN).

We had very good feedback and there was sufficient interest in an online game back in the first season where audiences could visit the theatre without many pandemic restrictions. The people involved gained skills and experience with OBS and got more comfortable with all technology involved.

We would probably look for another streaming platform than Zoom and work early on with the sound department.


Developing a game takes always more time than expected. Make early versions (pen-and-paper-narrations), test out the technology early on. Do not use Zoom, or test out if your sound ambitions match their latest updates.



In this digital theatre game, Prof. G. Petto, played live by Sofie Pint, works on creating an artificial intelligence with personality called PIN (Personality Intelligence Network). To gather data for this goal, she needs the audience’s help in guiding PIN through the day of a school child, making decisions and creating a unique personality on the way – and keeping PIN from having a mental breakdown. 
Using the mechanics of a branching narrative, Pinocchio A.I. is a play between game and theatre, society and individuality. Each choice the audience makes, gives or takes away points of energy, happiness and ambition for PIN, which the audience has to balance out. Invisible to the audience members, their choices also decide whether PIN is more outgoing or reclusive, more helpful or selfish, and so on. PINs personality is revealed to them at the end. 
The game runs as live online theatre game with the help of Zoom, OBS and NDI.
___________________________________________________________
A Landestheater Linz production as part of the Creative Europe project PlayOn! 

RESEARCH PLATFORM

Academy for Theatre and Digitality

Christine Härter

Dramaturg, Landestheater Linz

Short Bio

Projects

Contact

External Links