Deakin Motion.Lab Ph.D. student Gorkem Acaroglu won prestigious Australia Council Inter-Arts funding to develop an Artlab to investigate mixed reality performance. This Artlab will research the limits and opportunities for using TECHNOLOGY AS SUBJECT in THEATRE, where the technology PERFORMS as an actor does in traditional theatre: examining the interface between bodies as subject and technologies as subject, where the technology is capable of real-time spontaneous interaction with actors in dramatic theatre works.
THE MIXED REALITY PERFORMANCE LAB (MRPL) is a series of research laboratories conducted over two years developing cross-disciplinary methodologies into the interface between bodies and technology including:
Human-robot interaction
Augmented reality
Avatar and real time projection of virtual worlds
Motion-capture
3D Stereoscopic animation
Haptics and Virtual Reality
This research takes place through a series of residencies in technology centres with collaborations between theatre practitioners, new media artists, dancers and visual artists who work with electronic arts (at the Deakin Motion.Lab), and with scientists and engineers that are developing cutting edge technologies (robotics, haptics, embodied control of virtual worlds) at the Centre for Intelligent Systems Research. MRPL will test the use of these technologies in dramatic theatre works with characters that audience empathise with and a closed fictional world developed and accessed through dialogue.
