The Evidence Chamber

The Evidence Chamber is an interactive digital theatre experience in which twelve members of the public take on the role of jurors considering a difficult case in which the case for the prosecution relies heavily on forensic evidence. Prior to the COVID 19 pandemic, this piece happened with co-located audience members using iPads. During the pandemic, we converted this tablet-based experience to an online event, using an adaptation of our bespoke software platform. This conversion process posed various challenges, focusing on how to enable discussion between jurors, how to adapt the software to work on different browsers and devices and adapting to different broadband strengths and speeds. Here we place the piece in its context as a piece of playable theatre and cyberformance that explores legal themes and we describe how we overcame these conversion challenges and what benefits doing so produced. To enable discussion between jurors we embedded a web-based video chat into the existing software platform. To adapt the software to different browsers and devices we altered the video syncing, changed the document viewer and built a range of debugging tools, which we discuss. To adapt to different internet speeds we used adaptive bitrate streaming, using MPEG-DASH encoding.

a case study in adapting digital performance from a co-located experience to an online one
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