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by duped 878 days ago
My understanding is the economics don't work out for live theater. Most productions struggle to fill seats and have pricing issues. The productions that don't struggle (eg: Broadway) don't want to lower the demand for seats. That said, there is a financing issue with Broadway where productions are getting more expensive but audiences are price sensitive after some point, and with the finite number of seats available there's essentially a cap on the revenue they can bring in.

That's also ignoring the artistic issues with convincing actors/directors to design and conduct performances for audiences in a completely new way, which is the problem I was alluding to earlier.

> Maybe putting the viewer in the middle of the stage, but it would be a pain to keep rotating to witness the action.

This has been done before (I've even been to a few local productions where this is the norm) but you have to keep in mind the production is designed for the venue its performed in and where the audience is located.

I think there's a kind of theater production where you could use VR as a tool to a lot of success but I think the work has to be written for it, a production team that's down with it, a cast that can be trained to do it, and pricing model that makes it profitable.

It's a very hard problem domain that isn't technical. It's artistic, social, and economic.

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I think ballet would be a much better fit than theater, for what its worth.