You Should Have Stayed Home: How to Captivate an Audience in VR Theatre

Several recent productions have explored how theatrical performances can be performed in virtual reality. Their audiences move around the show’s virtual world, interact with its set, and listen to live performers. These virtual reality performances suggest a new form of digital play that utilizes the audience’s embodiment in the world and participation in its story to immerse them in it. In this paper, we describe how audiences interacted with the virtual reality play You Should Have Stayed Home. We contribute a design space for audio-visual entertainment media, use it to contextualize virtual reality theatre, and discuss how the show’s use of virtual reality technologies shaped how audiences play it.