Theater | A Finnish company developed a service that allows you to watch theater from your home sofa: HS’s editor tested it and was shocked

Virtual glasses head, a comfortable position in the corner of the sofa – and the theater evening can begin.

This will be true maybe already in a year or a half, if that Erkki from Izarra Closed. He is the founder of the startup company Second Theater and he wants to bring wants to bring theater performances for everyone to watch in virtual environments.

“Our mission is to acquire new audiences for the theater and record performances for future generations,” says Izarra.

“That’s why it’s called Second Theatre. We just capture the show as it is performed on stage and we don’t want to compete with it. A new layer of virtual box office is collected on top of the box office collected by the theaters, so it is another theater.”

Presenting art, i.e. theatre, opera and circus, has been videotaped for decades, filmed with several cameras, and then a cinematic narrative has been cut from the performance.

Instead, Second Theater aims to offer the viewer with virtual glasses the same experience as sitting in a theater stand. This is possible thanks to the immersiveness of the three-dimensional image world.

When you turn your head to the sides, you can see the edges of the stage, when you look up, you can see the ceiling and the first rows of the audience at the bottom – so everything looks remarkably similar to the actual theater. The three-dimensional image is recorded with a stationary stereoscopic camera, and the sound world is also spatial. So the sound seems to be coming from the right direction, regardless of which way the viewer has turned their head while watching the show.

Izarra presents Second Theater to HS in Helsinki, the startup’s first investor Henri Kulvik too in the study. You don’t need much for a presentation: all you need is VR glasses, headphones, a network connection and a comfortable seat.

These are the Oculus Quest 2 glasses, the best so-called everyman glasses,” says Izarra. “In better glasses, the image quality is already significantly better. In the future, glasses will become lighter and more comfortable. Then, when the glasses get 5G mobile data, you no longer need fast Wi-Fi for downloading, but you can conveniently stream shows anywhere.”

Even with these “everyman’s glasses” that cost about 500 euros, the experience is impressive. Three-dimensional virtual reality takes the viewer from a bright office room to a dark theater in an instant. The events on stage are realistic and the experience really immersive.

It is obvious that such a service can serve those who do not live near the theaters and therefore cannot watch a certain performance on site. This way, for example, from Espoo or Maaninga, you could easily get to experience a Berlin theater, for example, without having to leave your home sofa.

Geographical in addition to accessibility, Izarra and his colleagues have discovered many other advantages with the help of test audiences that can serve customers.

“Even though we don’t want to compete with actual theaters, we are constantly finding more new accessibility advantages. People hear lines better and see facial expressions better. They get to see the show from better places. Some may have fragrance allergies or autoimmune diseases. Someone needs to go to the bathroom a lot. Or maybe someone doesn’t want to sit in the middle row because they feel anxious.”

The business is still in the development stage. Second Theatre’s performances cannot be watched anywhere yet, as the service is in the pilot phase and is just being built. In the first funding round, the content of the service has been developed: the application needed to watch the performances has been coded and a few performances in different theaters have been recorded.

“In startup language, we have a Proof of Concept, that is, we have proven that this makes sense. Theaters are interested, the technology is there and people want to watch this. We have gathered angel investors for this a year ago and received all possible loans and subsidies from Business Finland. Now a new round of funding is underway so that we can build a customer service for commercial operations, record hard international shows and negotiate their contracts,” says Izarra.

For now the content has been filmed with pilot contracts, and at the moment there are ten performances recorded from four different countries, says Erkki Izarra: the Finnish National Theatre, the Swedish Royal Theater or Dramaten, Germany’s Berliner Ensemble and Thalia Theater, and Denmark’s Fix & Foxy.

“When we went to the Royal Danish Theater to talk about it, they said they were in a country with a lot of islands, and it’s hard to get to the theater from the islands. And when the operation of the Royal Theater is financed with tax funds, they said they would be very interested if this service could be used to reach the taxpayers living on the islands,” says Erkki Izarra.

“We think in the same way in Finland too, when we have spoken to, for example, the director of the National Theatre Mika Myllyahon with.”

Izarran according to Second Theater, at least at the moment, there are not many competitors. As far as he knows, there are only two direct competitors: the German Firstrow and the British Livr. The activity of both seems minor at the moment.

“So far, we have been able to take it easy, but we are not afraid of competition. In part, this is also a sign that this makes sense,” says Izarra. As one of Second Theatre’s trump cards, he mentions, for example, the high-resolution 3D image shot with stereoscopic cameras, which surpasses the 360-degree cameras used by competitors with its immersiveness.

Second Theater is also distinguished from its competitors by the internationality and quality of its repertoire. Already in the pilot phase, Second Theater has been able to cooperate with renowned theaters, and it can be assumed that there could be interest from around the world in, for example, Berliner Ensemble’s performances. Even a possible language barrier can be overcome by using subtitles.

The theater experience community spirit can also be sought in the virtual world. Second Theater’s features include “Social Mode”, i.e. a social function: viewers can watch the same performance simultaneously, as if sitting next to each other, even if they are actually sitting in their own rooms. Communication with the neighbor is then done through avatars in the virtual world.

“You can be at home, I can be at home, but we see each other and can talk.”

Second Theater has tested this feature as part of Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences’ Home Opera research project, which focuses on elderly people, technology and culture.

“The elderly have been in a great mood when they have been able to build avatars for themselves. And then when they start watching the shows, they act like they’re in the theater. This is precisely because of the immersiveness of the virtual world. They stop talking and sit motionless on the couch. It’s only when they remember where they are that they start whispering to each other, even though everyone is sitting in their own rooms.”

A well-executed VR theater has potential for anything

Even for a short time based on experience, the virtual theater performance offered by Second Theater is an impressive experience. I was able to watch the content of the pilot phase of the service, which includes several entire theater performances in addition to a short showreel, i.e. a sample summary.

The three-dimensional image and very repetitive sound make the experience remarkably realistic, thus immersive. First I watched the National Theatre Hair salonthen I moved to Stockholm, Dramaten for a while Liv Strömquist thinks about sig sälv couple.

It’s like actually sitting on the spot in a dark theater auditorium in a good seat and watching a live performance. I assume that the verisimilitude of the experience only deepens when you follow the whole theater performance and get carried away by the plot. The shows are filmed with a stationary stereoscopic camera, so there is really no fear of motion sickness even for those who might otherwise suffer from it when working with a moving camera image.

So there is potential for anything, including outside the actual spoken theater, although Second Theater is understandably trying to establish its activities in that area. But there is certainly nothing to prevent expanding the activity later to, for example, opera, circus or immersive concert recordings, even if producing them requires more work in audio editing than talk theater.

When the quality is good, it also makes people pay for the service. Audition audiences at Second Theater would be willing to pay an average of 17 euros for a show, which I could easily pay myself, especially if for one reason or another I couldn’t watch the show I wanted on the spot. If there was a VR show, say Broadway From the Book of MormonI would buy a ticket immediately.