Augmented Theatre

Augmented Theatre turns the phone in your pocket into part of the stage design. During the performance the production cues every phone in the house at once, over the venue's own Wi-Fi: • Surtitles — a line appears in your hand at the moment it is spoken, in any language, as large or as quiet as the scene needs. • Film and stills — video and photographs play on every phone together, started by a single cue and running in step across the room. • Light — a hundred screens fill with one colour, or a hundred torches come up together. • Touch — a pulse timed to a heartbeat, a knock, a tremor. • The theatre through the camera — the room seen through rain running down the glass, through heat rising off the stage, through scratched film, or turned around so the audience is looking at itself. • Scenery — hold a printed image, point the phone at it, and the set rises off the paper in three dimensions with video playing on its surfaces. • Sound with a place in the room — with headphones, a voice can be set down beside you and moved around you mid-sentence. Everything the evening needs arrives quietly while the audience finds its seats, over the venue's own network — no internet, no waiting, and nothing on screen until the show wants it. The app carries no advertising and asks for no account, and it does nothing at all until a production cues it: a phone that walks out of the building goes back to being a phone. For producers: shows are driven from Augmented Theatre Dashboard for Mac and iPad, which delivers the media and sends the cues. augmented-theatre.web.app