Reimagining the Audience-Dancer Relationship Through Mobile Augmented Reality

Abstract

The research and development of an augmented reality (AR) application for Vancouver-based dance company Small Stage challenged a team of students at a graduate digital media program to understand how AR might reinvent the audience-dancer relationship. This chapter will chronicle the AR and choreographic development process that occurred simultaneously. Based on the documentation of that process, a number of insights emerged that dance creators and AR developers may find useful when developing an AR experience as counterpart to a live dance production. These include (1) understanding the role of technology to support or disrupt the traditional use of a proscenium-based stage, (2) describing how AR can be used to augment an audience's experience of dance, (3) integrating a motion capture pipeline to accelerate AR development to support the before and after experience of a public dance production.