The Creation of an Interactive Virtual Theatre: The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party

Abstract

This chapter describes the technical and artistic issues involved in converting a linear piece of literature into an interactive theatre work. The scene used for this is the Mad Hatter’s tea party from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll.This was chosen for several reasons: there are a limited number of characters; and the work is quite surreal (including non-human characters) and so lends itself to virtual representation and familiarity of users with the scene provides a good basis for meaningful interaction.The linear text was expanded to allow users to interrupt the progress and interact with the virtual actors. This causes the linear nature of the piece to be broken, returning to the linear storyline when the users cease their interaction. ln this way, the scene can progress without users being present, allowing people to join the theatre at any time. The virtual actors have been created from photographs using a combination of commercially available software and software developed by partners in the VPARK project. The particular requirements of the characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland have posed some interesting problems, including how to model features such as Alice’s dress on real-time animated actors.These have been solved by extending the VRML body models and taking some artistic decisions on representation. The final result is a virtual interactive theatre that allows users to become involved in the drama unfolding. This provides a new kind of entertainment which uses the traditions of theatre to form a new relationship between the (virtual) cast and the audience.