Augmented Reality for Immersive Accessibility (ARIA) was developed through funding from Canada Cultural Spaces Fund with Talk is Free Theatre and Boredom Projects, Munich. The team comprised of Igor Chernukhin (Boredom, Airbus Defence and Space) and Joe Pagnan (DAN School Faculty, Talk is Free Theatre Artistic Resident) have created wearable technology to allow for live generated surtitles and cued closed caption surtitling for live performance both inside and outside of traditional theatre venues. Using Epson smart glasses and our proprietary hand controller, indy theatre users can generate their own surtitle files professionally translated into any language fitting our systems simple user friendly formatting requirements. With collaboration and testing between Argentina, Canada, Germany, and suppliers from around the globe, this international project has been tested on moving buses in Buenos Ares, warehouse film studios in Mississauga, and residential immersive theatre in suburban homes in Sudbury. The onboard live translation feature supports over 42 transcribable languages and over 20 translatable languages tested in Marathi, Spanish, French, Hindi, English, Russian, and German. Although AI has a significant way to go for accurate speech recognition of heightened emotions within a theatrical context of improvisation, this software and technology gives radical access to independent theatre makers to dismantle language hierarchies in performance spaces and closed captioning capabilities for immersive site specific projects where sign interpretation is untenable. Future project development for the integration of Indigenous languages and drivers that support characters unique to the language is set to begin fall 2023.

 

 

 

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