Imagine a virtual reality opera where viewers will be able to feel the rhythm of the singer’s vibrato in their bones. Or how about a national database where collaborators in different cities can “beam” in to opera houses via VR to study three-dimensional scenery designs. Those are two of the three winning proposals that came out of Opera Hack, an “ideation summit” that brought together 40 opera industry veterans and cutting-edge technology designers for a two-day hackathon July 27 and 28 at the Microsoft Offices in the UTC area. Developed by San Diego Opera and funded by Opera America, an industry service organization, Opera Hack was created to bring the 400-year-old art form into the 21s century with technology such as VR and augmented reality, 3D-mapping, artificial intelligent machine learning and creative coding. The goal was to create innovative experiences for today’s opera-goers and to use technology to both reduce the cost of producing opera and to make collaborations between opera companies and designers easier. Although San Diego Opera developed and hosted the competition, the results will be shared by all American opera companies in the coming years. Over two days, the group split into teams to flesh out their ideas, then submitted their proposals to a panel of advisers that included San Diego Opera’s General Director David Bennett, who created Opera Hack, a pair of opera singers, a software engineer and experts in the fields of sound, lighting, scenery and production design. The advisers chose three proposals from teams… [Read full story]
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