Conceived by DreamThinkSpeak and Access All Areas, Unreal City is a hybrid performance / location based experience in a new smart city district currently in development. A fully accessible block of smart studio apartments will lie at the heart of this district.

To view these new apartments, you are invited to book an appointment at our virtual marketing suite, unaware of the digital rabbit-hole through which you will soon disappear…

Blending live performance by learning disabled artists with virtual and mixed reality, Unreal City explores what personal connection means in a world that is increasingly digital. We’ve been developing Unreal City with DreamThinkSpeak and Access All Areas since 2019 through a series of workshops with a diverse range of talented artists. This project is a work-in-progress that will continue evolving.

All Seing Eye came on board at the very start of this project, working with Dreamthinkspeak and Access All Areas to mould the experience in initial workshops, through to final build and implementation at Battersea Arts Centre. The show consists of a unique combination of Architectural style visualisation rendered in realtime in the Oculus Quest 1 headset, as well as realtime avatars, photogrammetry and 360° video skyboxes to create a rich a detailed cityscape beyond the walls of the show home. Live actors from Access All Areas are also present throughout the experience to meet and guide the audience on their journey through the space, giving their unique input into the benefits of living there.

In order to maximise the throughput, the show consisted of 2 parts which enabled the experience to be run with overlapping run times, as one set of audience was starting the second part in an adjacent room, audience members were able to be brought in and begin the first part, creating a constant wave of intrepid arrives to the Unreal City show home. The was all manageable thanks to All Seeing Eye’s unique show control system, Showrunner, which was able to provide show operators not only with the ability to control these concurrent show times, but also provided access features such as sound and vision adaptation for sensory control, live feeds of all users’ exact pov, time and location within the experience and live cueing for unique features of the show.

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Originally commissioned by Battersea Arts Centre and developed at the National Theatre Immersive Storytelling Studio. Unreal City is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and The Foyle Foundation.