Four developed an innovative suite of performance technologies, including an controllable audience app emulating an entire smartphone, to enable one of the immersive theatre events of recent years in partnership.
User Not Found, produced by immersive theatre company Dante or Die, is about what happens to our digital identities after we die. You enter a café and receive a set of headphones and a smartphone. Several tables away, a man is grappling in real time with something deeply private. Gradually, you bear digital witness via smartphone and an intimate, funny live performance to a stranger’s profound experience.
User Not Found premiered to critical acclaim and five star reviews as part of Traverse Theatre's 2018 Edinburgh Fringe programme. It has toured to over twenty cafes across five countries in conjunction with world-class arts organisations such as Brooklyn Academy of Music, Print Screen Festival, Israel and Battersea Arts Centre.
Four worked with Dante or Die from the very start through a process of intensive co-creation from R&D at ArtsDepot and London's Southbank Centre through to test performances across the country to shows in Edinburgh and beyond.
Alongside the audience app, which went through more than 1,200 iterations through its development, we developed a bespoke network environment and smartphone charging hardware setup and created a number of control panels for the on-site stage managers. By building the entire stack from the ground up, we achieved millisecond-level latency and 100% uptime track record across hundreds of performances.
We later worked with Dante or Die on technical elements of additional shows as well as an InnovateUK-funded R&D project around VR & AR in Virtual Sites for Site Specific Theatre.