Designing Shakespeare, Virtual Reality Theatre Models. Arts and Humanities Data Service Performing Arts Archive.

‘Designing Shakespeare’ is an AHRC-funded audio-visual database developed to help students and scholars gain a greater understanding of the work of theatre designers active in Britain during the last 40 years of the previous century and to illustrate the vast range of possible interpretations of Shakespeare's work.

'Designign Shakespeare' contains four distinct elements; a collection of Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) representations of the key theatres spaces in Stratford and London where Shakespeare has been performed developed by Dyer; a text database of production details and excerpts from theatre reviews which refer to design; an image database of production photographs selected from the archives of the theatre photographers Donald Cooper and Tom Holte and from the archive of costume designer and lecturer in design, Janet Arnold; and a collection of video interviews conducted by Dr. Christie Carson with a number of important designers.

Using desktop computer based virtual reality Dyer explored how a series of theatrical stages can be presented so that they may be compared with each other for space and scale and which illustrate the advantages of digital technology for the study of performance history. The VRML models developed from theatre plans by Dyer allow for free roaming within them, but a series of viewpoints have been selected to show the stage from specific vantage points in the audience. Three figures have been placed on the stage to show scale and illustrate the relative size of the performance spaces.