LOST ORIGIN
Lost Origin is a boundary breaking experience combining immersive theatre, cutting edge mixed reality and state-of-the-art interactive technologies to forge new ground in live performance.
★★★★★ "Immersive theatre doesn't come much slicker than this ... seriously impressive … Lost Origin does a fantastic job of blending high quality production value with a relevant and fresh storyline." – WhatsOnStage
★★★★ "Loaded with secrets, surprises and unexpected tonal turns, Lost Origin is a playful interactive experience showcasing some superbly effective augmented reality technology." – The Stage
★★★★★ "Lost Origin is phenomenal, a theatrical production with the stakes of an escape room and the tension of a crime drama." – Broadway World
★★★★★ "A first-rate and unique entertainment experience." – London Living Large
"A great example of the development in immersive performance, and the strength in bringing strangers together to experience a narrative." – VR Focus
A mysterious warehouse hides a lost truth that is fighting to be heard…
Story Juice wrote and collaboratively experience designed Lost Origin with a multidisciplinary team led by Almeida Theatre and Factory42. Audiences are tasked with solving a mystery inside a dark web marketplace that evolves into a magical adventure, and combines story and interactive technologies in new and exciting ways that put them at the heart of the experience.The incredible cast includes Jodie Whittaker in an experience where audiences of six journey through a series of stunning sets rich with visual and narrative detail that immerses them in the storyworld. What starts as a high stakes undercover spy operation, turns into a poignant story of how one woman’s scientific discovery was ignored in her time.Environmental storytelling is fused with live performance, light escape room puzzling, non-linear exploration, narrative mechanics, holograms, interactive projections – where butterflies and fires respond to audience movement – and the interplay of physical and digital worlds, through mixed reality Magic Leap headsets and sensor technologies, which bring a ghost world alive. The experience then concludes with audiences choosing the ending.This experimentation with a range of immersive story forms, alongside brilliant collaborators, was the joy of the project for Story Juice.Go behind-the-scenes in these three short films
Our creative team discuss how the Offies Award nominated project merged the realms of film, game, and live performance, using mixed-reality headsets and cutting-edge immersive technologies; and audiences share their reactions to an experience unlike anything they’ve seen before.
After a 5-star review that said: “It genuinely feels like being on a movie set at times […] There has been clear thought about how to interact with visitors on every sensory level,” WhatsOnStage went behind-the-scenes with the creative team.
From 10,000+ individual lighting fixtures, the world's smallest proximity sensors that triggered motion-activated props, to spatial audio that worked in sync with the project's Unity engine, Lost Origin was a ground-breaking immersive experience showcasing new possibilities for the creative sector.
Lost Origin is majority funded by UK Research and Innovation's Audience of the Future programme to explore new forms of audience experience. It's the final stage of a collaboration between Factory 42, the Almeida, Sky, Magic Leap and the University of Exeter, with a range of other businesses including Story Juice. It's the culmination of a series of R&D outputs including robots and dinosaur-themed mixed reality experiences for shopping centres and two AR learning apps for kids, all produced in conjunction with the Natural History and Science Museums. Story Juice co-wrote the shopping centre experiences, Dimension X: Dinosaurs and Dimension X: Robots. Lost Origin began in 2019, on a planned year-long production schedule, as two different mixed reality experiences taking place in the museums and due to go live in July 2020. When Covid struck, we had to pause the project, picking it up again in February 2021 and reimagining it by combining the two experiences into one. Until June 2021, we were creating to an imaginary building because of lockdowns, before securing the warehouse at Hoxton Docks where the ambitious immersive experience went live.“The integration of immersive technologies, AI, projection mapping, haptics and new forms of interactive technologies into visitor experiences, from museums to theme parks, is incredibly exciting both creatively and commercially. While the pandemic has kept us out of venues, Factory 42 and its partners have been working incredibly hard to bring these technologies together in a dynamic, creative and at times astonishing live experience. Anyone who is interested in the future of museums, galleries, immersive theatre, storytelling and technology will get a glimpse of that future through Lost Origin.”
Watch the Lost Origin trailer
View the production images by Seamus Ryan in the galleries above and below.And read this opinion piece in The Stage from Lost Origin’s Executive Producer Michelle Feuerlicht about what we call this new form of audience experience.
