Once a month, Imagine Moody comes together in the Imagine Lab to host the Moody MeetUp, a conversation designed to engage UT students and faculty with topics around how certain industries are changing thanks to emerging technology. For the month of October, we wanted to bring the subject of VR and AR to students in ways they may be more familiar with: entertainment.

When VR first became a major accessible format in its early demo stages, many developers saw its primary role in entertainment. Around the same period, 360-degree cameras also became an accessible media, and filmmakers and game developers saw VR as a new avenue beyond the standard flatscreen TV. For most of VR’s life, the audience-centered format has grown less alluring and often gimmicky in its approach to put the viewer in the center of the action. For most, this only introduced nausea or motion sickness, and often still did not offer the audience anyway to participate or engage in the content beyond being able to look around as if they were in a snowglobe.

Now, while virtual and augmented reality have grown more accessible, there remains a collective expectation that VR/AR is just another way to watch something. While this could be the case for some of the content available today, VR/AR has introduced levels of interaction mass media has never experienced! Analyzing the entertainment industry in VR/AR today, we continue to see new ways creators are using the technology to exhibit their content, and sometimes even live, but we also have seen how VR/AR has given the audience new methods of interacting with things that are both new and familiar, changing what we now know as the potential for this emerging tech.

While the history of filmmaking has encouraged a distance (that is — the audience is intended to be separated from the screen), VR/AR intends to get the audience as close as possible to the content. Instead of simply visiting a theatre or venue to watch your favorite artists perform, and not to mention spending money to do so, shows can be recorded for the viewer’s convenience. There are some unique advantages to the medium, being that someone who may be disabled or separated from the ability to engage in live entertainment, VR/AR offers freedom to travel, experience, and move around a real space, digitally.

With this, exposition in virtual reality may not be what you expect, and interesting approaches to immersive live performances are making their way to the top charts inside VR app stores. Some apps even encourage viewers to tune in live performances without being able to watch the experience recorded later. Some exposition apps forego this approach and only introduce recorded content, but from multiple angles. You can now see the band you missed, and you get to pick your seat. While these services come with a cost, there are even more positive notes. Many VR/AR exposition apps are already burgeoning to mainstream media, being that partners such as the NBA, Comedy Central, and even music festivals, are bringing their often exclusive live content to VR so that everyone has an opportunity to get in on the branded content. The experiences demoed for this topic included Melody VR, Next VR, and Oculus Venues.

Emerging technology has notably brought new ways to interact with the content beyond being just the audience. Some shows, games, and even VR/AR apps require audience interaction — some even using content made by the users. This level of participatory culture has grown larger with the integration of the internet to these experiences, building communities that enjoy the virtual space as an extension of their role as the audience. Prime examples of this in VR are established internet communities, where people can join other’s rooms, play games, listen to music, or watch a movie, all is if everybody lived next door to each other. Other experiences are often not VR/AR at all. Mobile apps such as Trivia HQ (and its other forms) engage users with trivia shows hosted by a live person, with rewards available for all who play, and some shows request even more input by the user. For example, shows such as Artificial Next and Netflix’s Bandersnatch require the audience to reply or select options to keep the story going — with often unlimited potential. Choose your own stories have been around for a while, but these approaches blend visual, textual, and other forms of interaction to keep audiences involved in ever changing narratives that otherwise would not be possible without the internet and platforms such as Twitch. More people than ever are able to produce and contribute to live content than ever before, and its draw is getting wider as there are more avenues developers are discovering may be the key to an inclusive internet space. The demoes provided for this topic are Artificial Next, Bandersnatch, Trivia HQ, and VRChat.

Lastly, some emerging content has become a blend of both exposition and participation. Easier to use tools and apps have encouraged some platforms to be built entirely by users themselves, and these experiences tend to be held as some of the most popular utilities of VR/AR. Users can now build their own movie theatres for others to join, or host TV parties or game nights, all in virtual spaces. You might also introduce a virtual DJ performed by a live person with a VR set. This performance can then be broadcast to actual screens and other virtual movie theatres across the world, provided they have a VR headset (this was an actual experiment held at UT Austin as part of the Imagine Lab). Experiences like this may be happening right now, in virtual worlds across the world. While this amount of interconnectivity and simulcasting may be unprecedented, they do not have to be digital all the time.

Location-based experiences have become a traveling circus of sorts, introducing a variety of audiences to VR and specific experiences accompanied by physical objects. Reaching out for a hand in VR, you might just feel an actual hand on the other side, or you might need to walk around a real room, overlayed with the virtual space in the headset. Other apps allow the audience to create their own body using themselves as ever character (think Motion Capture that often costs thousands of dollars), or to make a movie in a virtual space training the user to perform every role. The role of the audience in these experiences is to be the director, creator, and user. While historically media has been segmented, emerging technology may be the future of entertainment in how we perceive ourselves in what we watch or play everyday. The demoes displayed for this topic are Bigscreen VR, TribeXR DJ School, Mindshow, and the location based experience War Remains.

Overall, entertainment in immersive interactive technology has always been one of the largest pillars of the industry, yet it is not done innovating and creating new ways for audiences to come together to learn and enjoy experiences that were not possible not too long ago.

Imagine Yourself Inside Live Entertainment was originally published in AR/VR Journey: Augmented & Virtual Reality Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.