Exploring Expansive Realities: An Interview with PXR 2024’s Nicole Eun-Ju Bell
At PXR 2024, performance meets expansive realities across physical and digital spaces. Established in 2020, the PXR (Performance and XR) Conference is Canada’s first and only conference on XR (Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality) performance creation. PXR 2024, hosted by Single Thread Theatre Company, takes place in-person in Kingston, Toronto, and Vancouver, as well as virtually, from Friday, November 8th to Sunday, November 17th—local Kingston events are in partnership with Modern Fuel, with Venue Manager Michaelah Wales. I was lucky to have the opportunity to chat with the venue producer of PXR 2024, Nicole Eun-Ju Bell. Bell is a multidisciplinary theatre artist who began doing XR work in 2020 with Single Thread, where she was an actor in Collider, before beginning to work with PXR in 2021.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
As venue producer for PXR 2024, Bell coordinates between three in-person venues, as well as collaborating to bring the XR offerings to life. Bell manages the budget, logistics, technical elements, and scheduling for the events happening in-person across the three cities. Bell notes that “a lot of my job straddles the line between administration and technical directing in the more theatrical sense. I do a lot of the technical directing and production management type of stuff,” in collaboration with the PXR team.
Bell describes XR as an umbrella term “using X in the algebraic x variable” that includes VR (Virtual Reality) “where you put on a headset and you enter a virtual world.” According to Bell, her mother likens it to the holodeck from Star Trek, which Bell finds to be a great point of reference for people who aren’t familiar with VR. She explains that in Virtual Reality, as in the holodeck, “You put on a headset, you enter a virtual world.” Whereas in AR (Augmented Reality), “We’re bringing the digital into the real world,” such as in games like Pokémon Go and filters on Instagram or Snapchat. Beyond these fields, there is also Mixed Reality, which “encompasses any of the other things that don’t very neatly fall into Virtual or Augmented Reality.” In summary, Bell says, in VR “you’re bringing yourself into a virtual world. Augmented Reality is you’re bringing that virtual stuff into this real world out here, and then Mixed Reality is somewhere between that—it’s a bit more nebulous.”
For PXR 2024, Bell and the team have been working on a simulcast system, which Bell says is something that has been around for a while and is a part of live streaming—with this system, they are able to simultaneously have “footage from multiple locations, all streaming out to each other.” Bell explains that in the three physical venues there will be people attending events as well as cameras and video set up so that everyone physically at each location “can see what’s happening and hear what’s happening in the other two venues.”
Although they were able to do so last year, they hadn’t yet fully integrated the VR element, which is the goal for this year—“We’re treating VRChat [accessible via headset that can be borrowed from any of the three physical venues] like a fourth venue as though it were a physical space. People will be able to go there in VRChat, and there will be a stream up that has the footage of the other three physical venues.” Attendees will “be able to see and hear what’s going on, and likewise we will be able to see and hear what’s going on in VRChat so they can speak to us and we can speak to them.” The system is not without its challenges, notably the lag time as Bell explains, but they’re working on exploring new technologies to improve the speed for next year.
Bell notes that AR is becoming more popular in the XR field over the last few years, and that PXR is “trying to pivot and see how we incorporate and recognize that.” She further explains, “We’ve been focused a lot on the VR elements of the conference…there’s a lot of really exciting work there, and we’re so excited to have everyone see what everyone’s doing in VR, but there’s a lot that’s also happening with AR that’s really exciting that we’re trying to find the way to do that while also keeping true to our roots as a conference that started in VR.”
For Bell, “the simulcast system itself is a technical as well as creative puzzle that has been a fun project for me that I pulled a lot of my projection design and production experience to build.” As Bell notes, Canada is a big place and having the conference online “allows a lot of people from a lot of different corners of the country to actually gather in one place and talk and exchange ideas.” Adding physical venues, Bell notes, provides additional logistics as they aim to “keep that kind of national connectivity while still also having a bit more local engagement and community building.”
One of the highlights of PXR every year for Bell is the XArtist Link-Up, which she describes as a kind of “game jam… where you build something together with a group of people you’ve met that week.” Participants include students from post-secondary schools across the country, “Some in theatre performance programs, some in video game design programs,” who are grouped together to build something in collaboration. Participants have the week of the conference to create something together, then present their work at the end. “It’s just amazing to see what students are able to pull together in a week,” Bell says. “There’s just so much creativity and so much excitement for the form… it’s pretty amazing.” Current PXR staff members Myles Steel and Cole Paskuski were also once participants in the link-up. As well, Bell is also looking forward to Futurenote Speaker Ån (Dr. Andrew Sempere), who also presented at the 2023 conference.
The conference promises to be an engaging and innovative event for XR workers and enthusiasts to meet and connect.
PXR 2024 runs from November 8-17, 2024 in Kingston, Vancouver, Toronto, and VRChat. For more information and tickets, click here. For more information about Nicole Eun-Ju Bell, click here.
