Old wine in new bottles: innovating the experience of opera with augmented reality technology

Confronted with decreasing public funding and changing cultural consumption patterns, cultural organizations such as theatres, opera and ballet companies, orchestras, galleries, libraries are increasingly using digital technologies to innovate their services and extend their audience reach (Bakshi & Throsby, 2012; Hausmann and Weuster, 2017; Visser, 2017). Current attention is particularly focused on the enhancement of cultural experiences through the latest technologies, such as wearable augmented reality (AR) technology (Leue et al., 2015; tom Dieck et al., 2016; Tussyadiah et al., 2017). This paper focuses on the experiential requirements and impacts of AR within the context of opera. In the recent years, opera companies have started to offer new performances and using the latest technological innovations to attract and involve larger and new segments of consumers, especially tourists (Prospero, 2015). However, opera is an eminently complex performative experience involving a repertoire of multimodal resources (Rossi and Sindoni, 2017), thus posing severe challenges and requirements for its enhancement through AR. Since technological innovation in this context appears as a promising trend, there is the opportunity to address the components that need to be taken into account when designing an innovative opera experience with AR. This paper describes the development of a model to evaluate the requirements for an AR experience at opera. Such a model could be useful for supporting organizations that need to carefully explore the potential of investing in new technologies for the enhancement of their audience experience and attracting new groups of consumers.