Song to the Moon

AR Immersive Opera Beta Testing

Ulster Touring Opera (UTO) and its partners are charting an important new immersive experience, where any user can enjoy and explore world-class operatic performance in their own home. In partnership with Belfast-based company Sentireal, UTO are beta testing at BEYOND a 5-minute-long augmented reality experience based on a section of Dvořák’s opera Rusalka.

Using cutting edge volumetric capture software Depthkit, the action will eventually take place in the user’s own home via smartphone or tablet. With a physical space at the Beyond Conference, our technical team will be able to programme the experience in a controlled environment so that the software understands the parameters of the room. The feedback from audiences will be an invaluable asset for the development of our work, and the conference will provide an unparalleled platform for sharing UTO’s vision of opera in the future.

This project will attempt to emancipate the reproduced experience of opera, so that the user’s view is not guided by the cameraman, but rather the users are free to engage with the performance as they wish from any angle. There is need for an opera company with advanced skills in creating AR Opera, to ensure that this 500-year-old art form is fit for the next five centuries and beyond. UTO intends to be a significant content creator in this new field, working at the cutting edge of technology and sharing its findings with the wider arts sector in Northern Ireland.