PoliVision LIVE: Virtual Production Technologies for Live Performance
Project partners: Kings College London, Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Poli Productions, A+E Lab, Target 3D
XR Network+ is supporting a collaboration led by Kings College London that is developing a prototype to make Virtual Production (VP) tools accessible to any member of the creative team, enabling artists to directly create and manipulate immersive environments.
The project team is developing PoliVision — a modular tabletop VP platform currently used for pre-visualisation — into an expressive interface to explore the capacity of VP technology across multiple live performance contexts.
The project simplifies technical workflows to introduce accessible, performer-led interactions across two primary modes by linking VP data directly to spatial-audio responses:
- Embodied creative interaction: Dancers explore movement frameworks as intuitive control mechanisms, allowing object manipulation and choreography to dynamically influence both sound and visuals in real time.
- Sound as a creative engine: Instead of serving as a secondary element, audio integrates directly into the VP system. Gestures trigger playback, spatialisation, and audio transformations alongside visual updates, establishing sound as a central dramaturgical driver and expanding the creative possibilities for music-driven forms like opera and musical theatre.
The collaboration is utilising the Guildhall School of Speech & Drama’s d&b spatial sound system and Stype motion tracking to embed the PoliVision LIVE prototype within full production workflows that mirror professional practice.
Through rigorous user-testing, the project is also bringing together communities of practice that are usually siloed. In live performance, digital and physical teams often operate on parallel tracks, divided by the different logics of virtual and real-world workflows. By positioning VP at the centre of the creative process, the project team is creating a shared interface through which artists, technicians, and designers can collaborate in real time.
The project is one of twelve collaborations that received R&D funding from XR Network+ through the XR Labs Fund. The funding call awarded grants of up to £25,000 for university-led collaborations to develop extended reality prototypes using facilities at UK universities.
Categories: Performance, Research, Technology