Immersive Theater and Interactive Gallery
MetaHarpers Immersive Theater is designed to be a community-focused, multi-troupe venue for performing multimedia arts. While the ground level is styled to look like a seaside circle of ancient standing stones with the magical power to transport visitors to different times and places, the theater area itself is minimalist so that each show can style it exactly how the director likes, with up to a 100×100 area to use, and multiple possible seating or standing configurations.
Our venue has a special focus on experimental, highly imaginative, or new theater technology and show formats. If you have a show concept and you believe it would go well this theater, please contact Arrehn Oberlander.
Most events and classes listed in the sidebar calendar take place a this theater.
Some of the technical features available to live shows include:
NEW 2021
- Ability to set completely different skies, clouds, and lighting via the EEP settings, on demand, choroegraphed down to the second.
- Ability to do full-screen fades of various speeds, transparency levels, and colors for any audience members
- Perfect texture caching built into the experience, for your rezzed props and particle effects!
- Ability to put textures, frames, scrims, or other types of information onto visitors screens to enhance the show.
All of these features are demoable upon request! Ask Fukuju Amaterasu or Arrehn Oberlander for a tour!
- Experience-driven sit and groundsit system with extremely low script usage and custom, superior sit positioning system.
- Experience-driven transportation to theater area with multiple special effects and activation sequences.
- Experience-driven camera system that does not require any special seats additional huds, or scripts!
- Multiple full-screen theatrical effects
- Multiple unusual seating formats
- Fully customizable, large theater area to fully immerse the audience in your show
- Plenty of script performance for performers and audience
- No neighbors– theater is on a corner with two void regions for maximum frame rates.
Additional Technical Details: When you enter the theater parcel, you will be prompted to become part of the ‘MetaHarpers Immersive Theater’ experience. You will receive a popup notice that the experience wants to obtain permission for a number of activities. The list of permissions that pops up in this dialog is the same for every SL experience, even if the experience does not use all of the requested permissions. In our case, we do not use in any way the permissions to “Act on your control inputs” or “Track your camera”.
When you accept the dialog a small harper logo will appear in the upper-right corner of your screen to let you know the experience is active. You can click it for more information. This logo will disappear naturally as you explore the experience, or whenever you click it. As you explore the experience, other buttons may appear in the same area that allow different actions such as transportation to scenes, seating guidance, and camera view opportunities.
The icon and the attached ‘Immersive Experience’ object will automatically delete itself when you leave the theater area.
The experience is limited to the theater’s region only. As soon as you leave the parcel, all permissions are cancelled and the logo will disappear.
Past Major MetaHarper Projects:
MetaHarper Modern / CoolOcean skins for Firestorm Viewer (2013+) This was an attempt by Arrehn Oberlander to make Second Life feel more immersive by making as much of the external viewer UI as color-desaturated and transparent as possible, on the theory that the virtual world content would pop out more. It was the first “Viewer 2.0” skin to use transparent toolbars.
The Inspiring Orientation (2012-2015) This was a full-sim concept piece, to introduce new users to core SL navigational skills using all-original scenes created by some of the most famous names in the SL artist community. Technically it also showcased destination portal technology to show off some of the most interesting places to go in SL in different categories, well before this concept started showing up in SL’s official onboarding areas.
Chasm Deep Mayan Future (2009-2012) This was a full sim concept piece envisioning a working community with housing, public areas, building sandboxes, and well developed roadways connecting to SL’s major continents. The concept was steeped in mythology and stylistically portrayed a fictional advanced Mayan civilization that became obsessed communicating to the stars.