NEW TECHNOLOGIES
Augmented reality
For the National Theatre in London, UK, technology
has provided a way to reach new audiences. The theater
has teamed up with Accenture to make smart-caption
glasses that improve accessibility for audience members
with hearing impairments.
The glasses are designed and manufactured by
Epson, and use software the National Theatre developed
in collaboration with Prof. Andrew Lambourne of Leeds
Beckett University. Subtitles are delivered straight to
the lenses, making it easy for everyone to follow along
to a play, opera, or any performance that uses language.
Perfect timing
The key advance is the quality of the pacing. The
software tracks the phonetics of the performance.
“We give the software the script in advance,” explains
Jonathan Suffolk, the National Theatre’s technical
director. “It listens to the words and follows them using
microphones. We add information derived from the
lighting and sound desks, and we effectively create
a live time code. It uses things that really happen –
dialog, changes in the lighting – to initiate the
broadcast of lines of text over wi-fi to the glasses.”
The glasses don’t just display dialog text as the line
is spoken, but just ahead, “so when the line is delivered,
30 AUDITORIA 2019 VOLUME ONE
it comes at the same time as it would to someone who
is listening,” Suffolk adds. “We’re trying to create a real
experience that matches as closely as possible.”
Soft focus
The glasses had to overcome a number of challenges.
Testers discovered some words with soft beginnings
were more difficult for the software to hear, so the
software had to be rewritten not to listen to the word
‘and’. There were also hardware challenges, such as
finding a battery that was able to sustain for a
four-hour performance.
Suffolk also believes venues today could find
a comparable existing version of smart-caption
glasses without getting involved in their development,
as the National Theatre did.
But the reward is clear. “It’s offering real access to
people,” he says. “The future now is to continue offering
these closed captions and improve on the accuracy,
although it’s really good now, but we also need to
incorporate sign language and audio description.
It’s an ongoing development. The key message is using
technology to solve access challenges for everyone for
live entertainment is absolutely key, and something we
should be doing in the 21st century.” n