Development Diary Eight: The Prince's New Clothes
Tomorrow, we’re excited to bring To Be With Hamlet to Kaleidoscope’s Summer Showcase on the 8th floor of 2 Metrotech Center, Brooklyn.
At the showcase, we will be doing our FIRST EVER public showing of To Be With Hamlet. In one part of the building, audience members will be able to watch Zach perform live in the motion capture studio. In another, participants will be able to put on the Vive and see that performance streamed live in the virtual Elsinore Castle.
Want to see the first ever performance of To Be With Hamlet?
Check out the Summer Showcase website here.
Buy tickets for the event here.
This past week, our team revamped several aspects of To Be With Hamlet. Our previous avatar’s skin textures were not to our standards, so we rescanned our actor Zach. We then applied the new scans to Zach’s rig so that he would look more natural.
Once this new avatar was in place, we replaced Hamlet’s previous outfit, a rather flappy tunic, with a more conservative dress shirt.
We’re excited to send our new Prince to Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier program and Dubai International Film Festival’s DIFFerent Reality program. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, so we hope the Prince can have a bit of a vacation in Utah or the UAE!
For more about To Be With Hamlet, check out our Facebook, Twitter, and Vimeo pages!
Press: M3diate Website
Development Diary Seven: Hamlet's Kingdom
Check out the latest prototype of To Be With Hamlet in the above video!
In the past week, we have made huge leaps with the project. We migrated Prince Hamlet and the Ghost to the illustrious Elsinore Castle, a grand stone fortress perched on a brotherhood of rocky cliffs.
Additionally, we finally got a tunic for Hamlet and a set of armor for the Ghost. Now that these prototypes of the clothing are in place, we will begin experimenting with various particle effects for both characters. For example, as the Ghost talks about burning in Hellfire, we might set him on fire.
We’ve also begun submitting the experience to major festivals such as Sundance Film Festival and the Future of Storytelling Summit. Our team hopes to share our innovative fusion of motion capture, live performance, and Virtual Reality with these awesome festivals.
Be on the look out for official Press Kit, which will be made available on our website’s About Tab by the end of this week.
In the Press Kit, we will outline some of the benefits that our sponsors will receive. These tentatively include, but are no means limited to, the following:
- Logo featured prominently during the experience.
- Logo featured on the production's blog, website (hamletvr.org), social media platforms, videos, and marketing materials.
- Sponsor profile on website, blog, and marketing materials.
- For larger sponsors, exclusive, private performances of the piece for the sponsor and their guests.
- Free tickets to public performances of the piece.
We also launched our official Instagram account this week. Follow us @tobehamletvr
Keep checking out our blog, Facebook, and Twitter for more videos and information about the project!
Twitter and Facebook: @ToBeWithHamle
Instagram: @ToBeHamletVr
Press: ThereIsOnlyR Interview and Article - "Hamlet Takes To The Virtual Stage"
The awesome Peter Feld, the Director of Research at The Insurrection, one of NYC's top VR publications, sat down with our Producer Javier Molina and Assistant Director Owen Bell to talk about creating Hamlet in VR.
Check out the article and interview here.
Development Diary Six: New Partnernships
We’re incredibly excited to announce that we will be partnering with M3diate, a networked multi-user VR environment. M3diate will allow up to fifteen audience members to simultaneously see and hear Hamlet confront his murdered father’s ghost. M3diate also provides spatial audio, which means that it will allow participants to hear different sounds depending on their position in the virtual space. For example, if an audience member is directly to the right of Hamlet, they will hear the Prince more loudly in their left ear than their right ear. If they are far away from Hamlet, they will hear him more faintly. M3diate’s hyper realistic audio rendering will enable participants to have an even more intimate connection with Prince Hamlet.
Learn more about M3diate here.
Our team is also incredibly happy to be accepted into the New York City Media Lab and the New York City edition of Kaleidoscope VR’s Summer Showcase 2016.
Join us at the Kaleidoscope Summer Showcase on September 13th from 6:30 PM to 10:00 PM at the MAGNET CENTER, 2 Metrotech Center, 8th Floor Brooklyn, NY 11201.
http://kaleidovr.com/event/2016-summer-showcase-nyc
Check us out at the New York City Media Lab on September 22nd from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM at Columbia University, Alfred Lerner Hall 2920 Broadway, New York, NY 10027.
http://www.summit.nycmedialab.org/
This past week, To Be With Hamlet also received an exciting amount of attention from the press:
The project was profiled by Peter Feld of thereisonlyr.com, a New York City-based research and analytics firm with a deep focus on virtual reality. Check out the article here:
https://thereisonlyr.com/hamlet-takes-to-the-virtual-stage-bcd324272552#.js57bv8lj
Our lead actor Zachary Koval also gave a shout-out to To Be With Hamlet when he was profiled by NYC’s NEXT magazine.
For more about our project, check our website: hamletvr.org.
Follow us on Twitter and Facebook: @ToBeWithHamlet
To contribute to this project's creation, donate here: http://hamletvr.org/donations
Anyone who donates more than fifty dollars will be entitled to a free studio visit! Anyone who donates more than five hundred dollars will be entitled to an hour long, one-on-one consultation on creating live theatre in VR.
Development Diary Five: Performing in a New Reality
Learn about Zachary Koval, the actor playing Prince Hamlet, and the challenges and breakthroughs he has encountered while performing in Social Virtual Reality!
This past week, our lab was visited by Bell Labs, Nokia, and NBC! Thanks for stopping by!
Since our previous 3D model of Zach was not to our standards, we will be rescanning Zach in the coming week. As of this week, Hamlet also now has 3D clothing to wear.
Now that we have established that our base concept and technology works, we are deciding on the direction we want to take this experience. As such, we are recreating many of our assets so that they will be of one theme.
For more about our project, check our website: hamletvr.org.
To contribute to this project's creation, donate here: http://hamletvr.org/donations
Anyone who donates more than fifty dollars will be entitled to a free studio visit!
Development Diary Four: The Play's the Thing
Watch our director David discuss directing performance in Social Virtual Reality!
We are officially out of the prototyping phase! Now that we have tested various techniques and concepts in VR dramaturgy, level design, and networking, we are advancing into production mode. This means we are bringing on new team members, such as Unreal expert Todd Bryant, and a sound designer.
We've made huge leaps in networking this past week. Our team met with a VR researcher at NYU's Shanghai campus and tested a system that would allow audience members to enter the virtual space through special "Holodeck" stations in Shanghai, London, and several locations in New York City. We can currently support fifteen people in each of these Holodeck stations. We have also begun creating a system that would allow audience members to access the experience from their home.
Along with these advances come new costs. As of right now, we are largely self-funded. In order to make this project and future productions of Shakespeare in VR viable, please donate here: http://hamletvr.org/. Anyone who donates more than fifty dollars will be entitled to a free studio visit!
The project is also gathering attention from exciting new partners. This coming week, representatives of Time Magazine, Bell Labs, and the Future of Storytelling conference will visit the studio.
For more updates like this, sign up at our mailing list in the contact section. Also, follow us on Facebook, Vimeo, and Twitter by clicking the icons at the bottom of this page.
Development Diary Three: Crafting a Prince
In the video above, learn how our team is making Prince Hamlet's avatar look as real as the actor playing him.
Our team has made many exciting discoveries in the past week: we have started using facial motion tracking, testing environments, and mapping textures to the 3D avatars.
In next week's development diary, you'll learn the discoveries and challenges our director and actor have encountered while crafting performance for this project.
Have a question about Hamlet? Comment below and a member of our team will answer it as soon as we can!
Development Diary Two: Capturing Performance
This week, the team shares how it is using state-of-the-art motion capture to create the first ever live performance in Virtual Reality!
Next week, the team will show how it will make Hamlet look photorealistic in the virtual space.
Development Diary One - Introducing the Prince
For the first time ever, Shakespeare will be performed live in a new reality - virtual reality.
Welcome to the Development Diary of To Be With Hamlet, the world's first live performance and Shakespearean production in Virtual Reality.
Each week, Hamlet's development team will share its challenges, discoveries, and methods through a one minute video and short blog post.
Have a question about Hamlet? Comment below and a member of our team will answer it as soon as we can!
For more about the project and its team, check out our About Page.