Sleep No More

The MIT Media Lab's Opera of the Future Group is collaborating with London-based theater group Punchdrunk to create an online platform connected to their New York City production of Sleep No More. In the live show, masked audience members explore and interact with a rich environment, discovering their own narrative pathways. We are developing an online companion world to this real-life experience, through which online participants partner with live audience members to explore the interactive, immersive show together. Pushing the current capabilities of web standards and wireless communications technologies, the system will deliver personalized multimedia content allowing each online participant to have a unique experience co-created in real time by his own actions and those of his onsite partner. This project explores original ways of fostering meaningful relationships between online and onsite audience members, enhancing the experiences of both through the affordances that exist only at the intersection of the real and the virtual worlds.

The first version of the extended Sleep No More was offered to a limited public in May 2012. Further elaborations and next steps are currently being evaluated.