An Italian opera company will don Google Glass for an upcoming staging of Puccini's Turandot. Singers, orchestral musicians and stagehands from the Teatro Lirico di Cagliari, in Sardinia, will wear the futuristic headsets at shows starting 30 July, allowing internet users to watch the opera from each unique point of view.
"We want to communicate the art of opera hoping that it will engage and interest people who normally don’t go to see performances," Mauro Meli, the opera company's general manager, told the New York Times. Watching an opera from the perspective of a soprano can be compared to the thrill of watching a football game through the eyes of a midfielder: "If a soccer player wore Google Glass, you’d see the ball coming," Meli said.
Opera Caligari will use Google's hardware with software developed by TSC Labs. "The audience will finally be able to see the show through the troupe's eyes," they explained in a press release. As Google Glass records the performance from the perspective of different participants, these views will be streamed online and through the opera company's social networking sites. The project is an branch of the opera's own Centre for Research and Technological Development, which explores different ways of bringing together technology and traditional opera.
While Caligari's plans seem more extensive than any predecessors', they are not the first opera company to experiment with Google's headsets. Earlier this summer, New York's On Site Opera used Google Glass to offer audiences a live, French-English translation of Rameau's Pygmalion, and technology writer David Pogue roamed through a recent production of Carmen, recording and disseminating footage with his headset.
Caligari's Turandot will run from 30 July to 16 August 2014.
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