A Study on the Audience Perception of Liveness and Viewing Immersion in the performing arts video

This study examined the liveness of the digital theatre in the academic world by applying qualitative analysis techniques, focusing on the effect on the audience's viewing immersion based on previous studies. The conclusions are following: First, viewing immersion was analyzed from the general characteristics of the respondents. In addition, the research questions were derived by analyzing the qualitative contents of the relationship between the digital theatre and the liveness variable. It was confirmed that there is a certain relationship between liveness of the digital theatre and viewing immersion by analyzing watching experiences of the digital theatre in research question 1.2.3, the influencing relationship between liveness and audience's perception in research question 4.5, and the future assignments associated with viewing immersion in research question 6.7.8.9.10. For the future development of the performing arts industry, the following is suggested from the implications of the study. First, the paradigm of the performing arts industry is changing under the technological progress and the digital revolution made up of the development of technology. Audiences are no longer watching at the theater or concert hall only, but they are using various media such as smartphones, computers, TVs, movie theaters, and VR devices everywhere. Therefore, the communication method and interaction with the audiences in the digital era should be different from the previous performing arts. Next, the digital theatre that occurred in a pandemic situation is not a complete substitute for the existing on-site theatre, but a diversified into a new type of performing arts industry, which suggests setting up countermeasures. There are several limitations indicated in this study, therefore follow-up studies are needed. The reasons are not only that it has a limitation of generalization by setting respondents’ pool for in-depth interviewing in order to make a qualitative analysis but also that it was not able to be more intensive discussion due to the lack of previous studies directly related to the digital theatre·liveness·viewing immersion. In particular, there are limitations that there was not specific statistics or data set suggested which is able to indicate the difference between the audiences of a face-to-face performance (i.e., offline theatre) and the audiences of a non-face-to-faceperformance (i.e., online theatre).