Associate Prof. Hsiao-Mei Hsieh, Department of Drama and Theatre
In recent years, the term “immersive” has become widely used across technology, education, tourism, film, gaming, exhibitions, and performance. This rise reflects a contemporary desire for embodied experience, positioning the body as a vessel for learning and as a medium for empathy and co-creation with machines and environments.
The concept of immersion first emerged in computer science to describe advances in display technologies and 3D imaging. As the video game industry integrated virtual camera control into console hardware, players gained the ability to manipulate perspectives and freely explore virtual space. Theatre mirrors this development. Building on the legacies of environmental theatre, installation art, and participatory performance, immersive theatre redefines spectatorship and empowers audiences. In the 21st century, performance aesthetics have thus shifted from the optic to the haptic, emphasizing interaction between audience and space.
Immersive theatre and virtual reality (VR) share a strong drive toward three-dimensional experiences. Both are audience-centered and emphasize world-building. The Department of Drama and Theatre at NTU has embraced this paradigm through interdisciplinary courses such as Immersive Experience Design, Technology and Arts in Theatre, and VR 360 Video. These courses foster collaboration across disciplines while exploring bodily agency in digital environments (Fig. 13). Projects such as 5G Hamlet, funded by the Ministry of Culture, experiment with remote co-performance, latency, and machine-mediated presence (Fig. 14), while the VR 360 Video course examines how camera movement and spatial dynamics shape perception. Together, these artistic and pedagogical practices bridge technology and the humanities, cultivating new embodied modes of learning and creation.
Fig. 13. Final projects from the course
Display Technology and Immersive Experience Design present students’ interactive video works. Instructors: Hsiao-Mei Hsieh (Department of Drama and Theatre) and Lung-Pan Cheng (Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering).
Fig. 14. Students conducted a remote co-performance experiment based on
Hamlet. In the top image, Horatio (performed by Cyril Bizien) is at Venue A and films the audience; the live footage is transmitted in real time and projected onto the screen at Venue B. The bottom image shows the projection wall as seen from Venue B. Instructors: Hsiao-Mei Hsieh and Cheng-Yuan Wang (Department of Drama and Theatre). (Top photo: Yi-An; Bottom photo: Chia-Rong Hsieh)