London’s National Theatre just took a big step toward inclusivity and accessibility, and it’s all thanks to smart glasses that look a bit like Google Glass. The glasses offer hard-of-hearing audience members live subtitles through augmented reality so they always know what witty dialogue is being bandied about by the actors on stage.
The glasses took two years to develop, according to an interview with Jonathan Suffolk, the theater’s technical director, in the New York Times. The biggest challenge was creating software that displayed the dialogue as it was being delivered onstage, so that everyone could, say, laugh at a joke at the same time. It’s a particularly tricky problem, because actors tend to speak at different rates, and the theater wanted technology that could respond to that. What the developers came up with was a software link that follows live speech patterns and recognizes stage directions, so the subtitles appear at the right time and place. The glasses aren’t cheap, costing around $1,050 a pair.
The National Theatre has long been at the forefront of bringing tech to the theater. The immersive storytelling studio it runs with Accenture uses virtual reality to help patrons lose themselves in the theater, one story at a time.