Beckett in VR: exploring narrative using free viewpoint video

This poster describes a reinterpretation of Samuel Beckett's theatrical text Play for virtual reality (VR). It is an aesthetic reflection on practice that follows up an a technical project description submitted to ISMAR 2017 [O'Dwyer et al. 2017]. Actors are captured in a green screen environment using free-viewpoint video (FVV) techniques, and the scene is built in a game engine, complete with binaural spatial audio and six degrees of freedom of movement. The project explores how ludic qualities in the original text help elicit the conversational and interactive specificities of the digital medium. The work affirms the potential for interactive narrative in VR, opens new experiences of the text, and highlights the reorganisation of the author-audience dynamic.