The Lens Suite : Part 1

Time to rethink live entertainment. We can create better, more immersive shows by renewing our perspective, examining the wider entertainment field, questioning our motivations, and spectators’ ways of seeing. Often, venues are filled with large displays, powerful sound, lights, and playback tools, leading to incremental progress but higher technical demands. In some cases, it feels like the justification for live shows stems from the need for the audience to attest impact, with content flowing from surfaces into cameras - from one digital space to another.

Yet, the true challenge to traditional live entertainment has been more subtle. Let's focus on crafting experiences that don't just rely on technical spectacle but also deeply resonate with the audience, creating lasting emotional connections.

In 2024, significant advancements in spatial immersion and ubiquitous computing were marked by Apple's VisionPro headset and MSG-Sphere venue. These innovations, along with others like Liminal Space, COSM, MetaQuest, and Snapchat-Spectacles, underline the growing accessibility of high-quality mixed reality (mR) to broader audiences. 

Generative AI is poised to create on-demand narratives, potentially enabling personal headsets to deliver convincing subjective realities and companionships beyond physical spaces.

Technologies that transformed the film and events industries during COVID-19, such as LED volumes for real-time in-camera productions, have influenced large-scale shared immersions. U2's inaugural show at the Sphere exemplified this, with set-designer Willie Williams emphasising the profound impact of physical proximity and shared experiences in creating deep emotional connections : 

And he continues:

This philosophy highlights the importance of communal encounters in fostering lasting memories and emotional bonds, which are important to our humanity and at the same time valuable for brands, institutions, and media competing for audiences' attention.

While headsets - personal devices like phones or glasses - excel in interactivity, extent of world knowledge, and virtual community creation, they can exclude those without access to the necessary devices or bandwidth. Sphere shows, on the other hand, limit freedom of movement and audience interaction to the level of emotional affirmation, but therefore provide deeply connecting experiences proportional to the number of visitors. Studies suggest this effect to be truly visceral and once an audience is large enough it forms a crowd, which has persuasive effects, since “The images evoked in their (the crowds) mind by a personage, an event, an accident, are almost as lifelike as the reality.” …and… “Whether the feelings exhibited by a crowd be good or bad, they present the double character of being very simple and very exaggerated. ” Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd; study of the popular mind, Chapter III-33 + II-3. While Le Bon is most concerned with the primal and unreflected states of the crowd, I would like to emphasise their potential for amplified (positive) emotion - euphoria - in the context of this examination.

The deep emotions felt among crowds might be why games like Fortnite have begun to mimic live show formats. Similarly, live entertainment now often patches virtual content (aR) into the stage space. What is convincing to remote audiences breaks the magic of immersion for visitors at the events, who need to gaze at such hybrids on image magnification (imag) screens or phones.

To be meaningful, the challenge for live entertainment lies in designing spaces that combine interactivity, free movement, and communal affection, while maintaining a single unified viewing experience.

Headsets and the Sphere engulf us in fully-rendered sophisticated worlds, acting as the primary light sources within their respective visual bubbles, in which display and content become equivalents. Both offer similar capabilities in reproductive fidelity. Headsets render stereoscopically, while large domes still provide a convincing experience since their audience is placed beyond the threshold of depth distinction (schematic), and anchored by a real stage at the focal point.

Nevertheless, both immersions can break if there are visual obstructions. What is too much haze or stage light in a Sphere? Is there a fleck or smudge on the headset optics? Therefore, contact lenses may represent the ultimate form factor for the latter. The term "lens" feels apt generally. It has also been coined in connection with Paul Milgram's 1994 paper "Augmented Reality: A Class of Displays on the Reality-Virtuality Continuum," and used in products like Microsoft Hololens and Snapchat lenses (filters), which define see-through and window-on-the-world overlays. The key difference between the lenses we have discussed, is in being on opposing ends of a shared-experience spectrum: headsets isolate, while spheres stand for community and visceral emotion . Therefore we can already distinguish personal-lenses from crowd-lenses. Here it is important to understand that forming crowds is very different to connecting individuals.

In contrast to the lens-spaces, I would like to refer to canvas-spaces denoting any other types of media related entertainment, displays and stages, where original environment, show surfaces and technology can typically be differentiated well. These forms of entertainment cannot encompass the audience with the same fidelity, so their lens is permeable by definition. In their canvas-space many types of lights and emitting sources affect each other and the environment.

The lens dissolves displays, while the canvas-space remains full of them!

At first sight both lens types deepen the divide between the real and virtual by technical means of augmentation and mediation, but considering the persuasive aspect of images (see Le Bon quote above); for crowds it is not. This is also the case for digital natives, who have spent more of their lives with various types of screens than without. Here is why:

In a 2022 interview by Alex Heath for The Verge, Keanu Reeves noted that for digital natives, space is completely synthesised: "Who cares if it's real?" Older generations cling to that “legacy feeling”, which Paul Milgram analogously foresaw from a technical perspective in 1994:

The dichotomy in immersion used to be real vs. virtual, but that actually gets dissolved through technology and media exposure.

The deep emotions felt among crowds might be why games like Fortnite have begun to mimic live show formats. Similarly, live entertainment now often patches virtual content (aR) into the stage space. What is convincing to remote audiences breaks the magic of immersion for visitors at the events, who need to gaze at such hybrids on image magnification (imag) screens or phones.

To be meaningful, the challenge for live entertainment lies in designing spaces that combine interactivity, free movement, and communal affection, while maintaining a single unified viewing experience.

Headsets and the Sphere engulf us in fully-rendered sophisticated worlds, acting as the primary light sources within their respective visual bubbles, in which display and content become equivalents. Both offer similar capabilities in reproductive fidelity. Headsets render stereoscopically, while large domes still provide a convincing experience since their audience is placed beyond the threshold of depth distinction (schematic), and anchored by a real stage at the focal point.

Nevertheless, both immersions can break if there are visual obstructions. What is too much haze or stage light in a Sphere? Is there a fleck or smudge on the headset optics? Therefore, contact lenses may represent the ultimate form factor for the latter. The term "lens" feels apt generally. It has also been coined in connection with Paul Milgram's 1994 paper "Augmented Reality: A Class of Displays on the Reality-Virtuality Continuum," and used in products like Microsoft Hololens and Snapchat lenses (filters), which define see-through and window-on-the-world overlays. The key difference between the lenses we have discussed, is in being on opposing ends of a shared-experience spectrum: headsets isolate, while spheres stand for community and visceral emotion . Therefore we can already distinguish personal-lenses from crowd-lenses. Here it is important to understand that forming crowds is very different to connecting individuals.

In contrast to the lens-spaces, I would like to refer to canvas-spaces denoting any other types of media related entertainment, displays and stages, where original environment, show surfaces and technology can typically be differentiated well. These forms of entertainment cannot encompass the audience with the same fidelity, so their lens is permeable by definition. In their canvas-space many types of lights and emitting sources affect each other and the environment.

I argue that we can equate Lange’s camera with screen since both have become ubiquitous and instantaneous counterparts. So the subjective and experiential self and eye define the lens, not the form of the display or recorder. This is a radically new understanding of the meaning, which is:

A lens is any comprehensively sophisticated space curated by a narrative. In essence, a lens signifies strong immersion. While realities and virtual environments merge, fact and fiction become more important distinctions, when defining a lens’ narrative, story, or motive for audiences to identify with.

Initially, we saw lenses as immersive environments tied to opaque display technologies, like advanced headsets and large domes. This limited view excluded other media and live show designs. However, by understanding today's synthesised viewing habits, and by redefining lenses as spaces with strong narratives, canvas-spaces can also become lenses, if they provide a compelling motive.

Some shows and entertainment types remain as canvases, delivering excellent results following present traditions and form. Others should adopt the broader lens concept to enhance their offerings. When they do, their primary task is to create rich environments and foster shared community feelings, achieving their immersive potential outside of fully mediated spaces by leveraging their unique and combined strengths. This entails strong narratives, seamlessly blending physical and digital elements, functioning well for both individuals and groups, and disguising displays when they cannot dissolve.

... Continue : Part 2