Introducing The Magic Stage
The Magic Stage is an immersive virtual imaging technology for live stage performance that merges live performers and solid objects with virtual worlds and effects to the degree that the eye and mind have trouble separating them. It is unlike, and more powerful and versatile than any live stage technology in the market today.
What Does the Magic Stage Do?
It is an entirely unique way of building a performance stage, integrating imaging, projection, and motion tracking technologies with optical and motion control elements, all of which are unseen by the audience.
The end effect is to allow live performers on a physical stage to be immersed in life-like 3D virtual worlds, and to be interactive with those worlds; picking up virtual objects, opening virtual doors and entering into alternate virtual worlds.
In addition, the optical image of the performer, or other physical object, can be overwritten with still or animated virtual images, obscuring and replacing the body or object itself. And optical tracking systems can attach the images to the performer’s body, even in motion, across or up and down stage.
Finally, the performer or object can be completely transformed into an animated virtual body or caused to appear or disappear in the middle of a brightly lit stage. Almost any effect that can be created in motion pictures can be brought to live performance through this unique technology.
See The Original Technology In Action
While video, by its very nature is incapable of completely communicating the Magic Stage experience seen by live audiences, the three videos presented here, through the images captured by video cameras set up in front of the stage, and by the words and endorsements of award-winning actors, dancers, magicians, and science fiction writers who saw the Stage in operation, give a powerful evocation of this unique new performance medium.
The Purpose of the Magic Stage – The Creation of Virtual Magic Theater
While such a technology obviously has multiple uses, from Theme Park experiences, trade show demonstrations, theatrical and live concert special effects, etc.; it was invented to create a new medium in the performing arts – Virtual Magic Theater.
There is no single clear model from film, live theater, virtual reality or even literature for the nature and structure of Magic Stage experiences. The closest models are those which come from stage magic itself, or more precisely, Magic Theater, a form of magic and the theatrical arts that traces its roots at least as far back as Greek Theater; but which had its greatest flowering in the Magic Theaters of 19th Century London and Paris.
The History of the Magic Stage, the Magic Theatre Project, and the Overview Institute
In the mid-90’s, David Beaver, Co-founder of the Center for Planetary Identity and the Overview Institute, invented, patented, and built the first Magic Stage to demonstrate and implement a modern Magic Theater, basing it on a new cognitive model of the effects of stage magic on mind and perception, merging it with optical magic developed in European Magic Theaters, and powering them with modern cutting-edge projection, computing and visual effects technologies.
As Cassettes of the stage circulated, they drew representatives from Peter Gabriel, Michael Jackson, Pilobolus, Disney, Paramount, Viacom, etc.
Pilobolus worked with the Stage for a year to create the first true Virtual Reality Modern Dances. They were booked into the Joyce Theater in New York (the “home” of Modern Dance) for the world premier of the Magic Stage and their VR dances in August 2000. That Spring, the dot.com bubble burst, and investment money dried up overnight. The Stage company collapsed by August. Though the company had raised nearly $1M to get to that point, it would likely have taken a similar amount to make it through the next several years of investment draught and start-up failures.
David spent the next three years writing the last three of his four books on the research that led to the Stage, and which applied cutting-edge research in human perception to the interactive relationship between perception and media images. Privately printed and circulated to leading academics, they drew invited lectures from university graduate schools in Design, Psychology, Virtual Reality, Theater, Filmmaking, and the last two at the Duke Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.
In the last year of the Stage, one of the (then) leaders of what in now called the New Space industry brought David to a major industry space conference in D.C. where he met a number of the now current space leaders; Peter Diamandis, Eric Anderson, Buzz Aldrin, Robert Bigelow, and others. David maintained contact with many of them, and came to realize that while they indeed had a need to tell the “New Space” story more aggressively than they had been, their real and largely unrecognized need, was to how to bring the very reality of space into modern culture.
After writing the books that documented his research and new theories of perception of media images, as well as the university lectures that gained him validation from leading academics, he began putting together the team that would ultimately play a major role in bringing the reality of the experience of space into the world.