The Lens Suite : Part 2

Before we proceed, let's consider some examples:  I assert that recent trends in live show designs anticipated the lens concept without explicitly using the term and its implications. By becoming aware of this and embedding this new notion, we can enhance our understanding of each project's vision, leading to better immersions and improved processes, tools, and collaborations.

While sorting through the studio archive recently, I found many show setups from the past decade. Often, these included a few screens, projection props, and lights, but also more accurately scanned architecture and seating plots. Over time, the stage's aperture has expanded creatively. This is particularly obvious in theatres, where the area covered by projectors and ambient light control has led to content spilling onto adjacent walls. What began with augmenting smaller structures has evolved into custom prosceniums, dissolving the stage edge (How to Train Your Dragon), and fully taking over the architecture itself (Radio City Music Hall, Al Wasl Dome - Expo2020). 

This trend continues with tailored displays seamlessly integrated into custom-built theatres, surrounding the audience and breaking the fourth wall with action close at hand or directly above the guests. Props and architecture are becoming seamless extensions of the story, merging reality and fiction (Tempest, FFL).

Abba Voyage in London exemplifies this trend, dictating stage and content design while overcoming clichés of real and virtual (see part 1: legacy feeling), perfectly blending rendered and actual lights, audience, actors and avatars. Continuing this notion, much like iMax to cinema, the canvas space is breaking free from the curtain to fill the periphery.

Keynotes (Open Saudi) and brand experiences (L460) also immerse visitors, making them part of the action. Unlike theatres, these spaces often allow people to roam freely and gather at the best viewing spots seemingly at their own will. This is particularly true for showrooms and themed entertainment that guide visitor flow (30Rock Observation Hall, View Boston). 

While all these spaces typically feature less encompassing displays, the viewer's attention is directed along a path, not just through time. Consequently, the quality of immersion can vary with the rate of travel. At pause points, the view, immersion, and entertainment expand, typically becoming more ambient and abstract in transitional spaces.

Analogous to the stereoscopic virtuality of headsets, projection-mapping, emissive displays and lighting can augment a physical substrate - props, models, actors and more tangible objects - adding dimensionality and allowing greater freedom of movement for viewers. This can turn canvas-spaces into unified fields of light, something lighting designer Manny Treeson calls “luminous scenery”, i.e. a much more expanded and immersive 'canvas' for conveying story and information. Where the dimensional luminous scenery meets social engineering, interior design, sound, and practical effect, the space inevitably evolves into a lens.

In part one I already argued, a lens environment is dictated and completed by a narrative. This  narrative can range in meaning from an abstract theme, to a timeline, story, and documentary - it does not imply that lenses are purely fictional. The narrative is the main motive and justification, which  can also be based on facts.

On one end of the spectrum, showrooms, exhibitions, and walk-through entertainment illustrate this concept, while on the other end there are large-scale curated environments like theme parks (Main Street and the Castle at Disney, Hogwarts, and Super Nintendo World at Universal) as well as entertainment for audiences in captive spaces such as airports (Portland International Airport); all of which are microcosms that define their own substrate.

Inside these spaces, fact and fiction merge according to their motive, above and beyond real and virtual. Consider the range from aquariums for instance, to ‘reality thills’ with analogue methods such as  lighting and practical effects (Alien War 1992-96, escape rooms), to digitally enriched experiences with complex projections, spatial sound, practical effects, and custom displays (Johnnie Walker Prince Street); all offering robust glasses-free shared experiences. Nonetheless most experiential venues are interior spaces with capacities for a few dozen people, which i would define as groups, distinct from hundreds or thousands forming crowds.  These spaces allow very personal interactions among participants, ranging from holding hands to spectators and actors becoming interchangeable (Punchdrunk, Secret Cinema). The social dynamic can shift both spontaneously and intentionally, altering the space's purpose.

While not fully rendered and largely determined by canvas technologies, these spaces are accomplished by successfully superimposing narratives onto real world props and are therefore intrinsically limited in size. This is why I would like to call them group-lenses. Groups in contrast to crowds also have different faculties of reason and emotion, which need to be reflected in the environment design and plot.

Group-lenses can be planned, commissioned, and managed with reasonable effort, existing within regular architecture. This benefits location and accessibility, ultimately pointing to the interface between fictional and factual spaces. Similar to stepping through a wardrobe, they connect fiction to the physical world through ordinary doorways, bridges and other conduits - a trait shared with concept stores. Therefore, these spaces are often found in cities, on high streets (Louis Vuitton-Exhibition Series, Outernet - London), and recently in airports and malls.

They typically provide a transitional landing and decompression zone for visitors, offering a seemingly normal space from where the augmentation intensifies. This smooths the transition between the ordinary and narrative, unlike putting on headsets or travelling to a special crowd event location, both loaded with expectations, which can be useful in its own right. The group-lens conveys fictions more seamlessly without breaking visitors' preconceptions.

Lenses, beyond the narrow definition of headsets and spheres, take shape by blending the real and virtual, substrate and narrative, and ideally remain nested within ordinary communal spaces to lower the conceptual entry threshold. 

Next, let's review and imagine tools that help to solve specific challenges posed by group-lenses. 

... Continue : Part 3