Toby Coffey: ‘Immersive technologies are a whole new format coming in to land’

Virtual reality is still at a nascent stage of development and has a long way to go before its potential in live performance and storytelling is realised, according to the National Theatre’s head of digital development Toby Coffey.

Speaking at the Future of Theatre conference, he warned that a “gold-rush mentality” during the pandemic in terms of exploring VR risks creating “false expectations” about the sector’s current capabilities with the technology.

Coffey helped establish the National Theatre’s Immersive Storytelling Studio in 2016, which develops new forms of performance and audience experience through emerging technologies such as VR and augmented reality.

He said: “In 2016, somebody from Facebook on a panel session said they thought that virtual reality was at the 8mm phase of film by comparison, and I thought then and still think now that we’re probably even earlier than that. That for me is a great thing because there’s lots of development still to come.”

Coffey said that during the pandemic he felt that “VR years were like dog years in that so much happened within a 12-month period”.

He added: “Combined with the fact that it was kind of a gold-rush mentality at the time, what you get is a set of conditions that can make wider society and different industries assume that we’re getting further ahead than we actually are and we can create false expectations.”

According to Coffey, immersive technologies are a “whole new format coming in to land” in the same way that radio, TV and the games industry did. He believes that the form is still awaiting a major “intervention” to put the concept more widely in front of the general public.

The key to further developing the application of immersive technologies will be a combination of managed risk, collaboration, R&D and “beginning with smaller experiments that will then iterate up into and inform the larger audience experience”, he told the conference.

“In 2019, we started to see the green shoots of commercial success in the form of public-facing room-scale experiences,” Coffey added.

The talk also outlined some of the previous projects from the Immersive Storytelling Studio, including Jordan Tannahill’s one-on-one experience Draw Me Close, which merges virtual reality, live performance and animation.

However, Coffey said he wanted to move beyond the perception of VR as an “isolating experience” and also highlighted some projects from the past year that indicate how VR could be used in a more communal setting, including music performance experiences within the game Fortnite.

The talk concluded by exploring the implications of immersive technologies for venues. According to Coffey, websites are currently being developed that are “very much like a venue” in terms of being a location where performance is presented, while physical venues will need to become more adaptable to different types of performance and digitally connected.