Intel and The Royal Shakespeare Company collaborated on the world’s biggest theatre stage—The Royal Shakespeare Company’s—to demonstrate how technology can push the boundaries of creativity in the performance arts.

Intel helped create a digital avatar live on stage at The Royal Shakespeare Company. It took over three years to bring the technology to the stage, enabling the avatar to perform Shakespeare’s Ariel, a spirit-like character who shapes and shifts depending on his emotions. The technology Intel deployed was incredibly ambitious—a true world first. Live motion capture and projection of facial expression has never before been achieved in the theatre. Real-time data from a motion capture suit and rig were mapped to a complex digital avatar. That avatar was morphed and transformed into many different characters throughout the performance and then projected through 27 different projectors on stage. This live projection required immense amounts of processing power, which would not have been possible without Intel technology. Intel custom-built a processing stack for this project. The result was a dream-like world that was constantly transforming in front of the audience’s very eyes.

The initial nine-week run of The Tempest at The Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon was so successful that it will move to London’s Barbican Theatre starting in June 2017. Screenings of the performance were broadcast live in cinemas across the UK, Australia, and the US. The real-time motion capture and projection technology that Intel and The Royal Shakespeare Company deployed for this project have huge potential to be built upon and iterated in future projects.