The Round

The Round is an innovative new platform for professional artists and creatives to produce, build and distribute performances delivered live to audiences' homes globally. Utilising real-time remote motion-capture and operating technology and virtual creation tools, The Round will bring audiences and their friends closer to live theatre than ever before in a social, interactive virtual theatre at home. The Round is created by Reality Check Productions, with the support of location-based Mixed Reality experts Figment Productions and in partnership with Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, motion capture experts Target3D and volumetric capture experts Condense Reality.

Created especially for the platform, productions in The Round use Mixed Reality technology to allow audiences to watch new live shows, with their friends, from any viewpoint. Following the prototype build of The Round, funded by Innovate UK's COVID response grant, the next phase of development will bring The Round to Alpha deployment, with the support of Figment Productions, through to Beta launch and on to the first public release in June 2021\.

During the current public health crisis, it is vital that we continue to create innovative and exciting new theatrical work for audiences at home, while at the same time supporting those industries so badly affected by the impact of global disruption. With no clear indication of the easing of social distancing measures in the UK's world-leading indoor theatre venues, The Round will deliver a means for the immediate distribution of live performance that is future-proof and adaptable to the needs of the industry and the demands of audiences. In the long-term, we hope The Round will contribute to the development of a new hybrid immersive entertainment medium for at-home and in-location live performance, created by British SMEs, with global export potential to international markets.

The Round will further contribute to the theatre industry's continued growth by mitigating it's environmental impact through reducing the need for international travel, physical waste from set construction and energy consumption from performance. The platform will increase accessibility for audiences across the country, particularly those unable to travel, improving resilience for the theatre industry for any future disruption.

Furthermore, the innovative theatre visualisation and remote collaboration tools developed for The Round will reduce the cost of theatrical R&D, enabling more experimentation, artistic risk-taking and greater, hyper-specific audience analysis for risk mitigation in the costly process of theatrical pre-production. As a result, we hope for The Round to become a go-to destination for experimental live performance content that directly reduces the likelihood of failure in the commercial theatre industry and drives greater returns on investment and consequent growth in the industry.