Publication
What's my line? glass versus paper for cold reading in duologues
Jamie Ward; Paul Lukowicz
In: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing: Adjunct. International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp-16), Pages 1765-1768, ACM, 2016.
Abstract
Part of an actor's job is being able to cold read: to take words directly from the page and to read them as if they were his or her own, often without the chance to read the lines beforehand. This is particularly difficult when two or more actors need to perform a dialogue cold. The need to hold a paper script in hand hinders the actor's ability to move freely. It also introduces a visual distraction between actors trying to engage with one another in a scene. This preliminary study uses Google Glass displayed cue cards as an alternative to traditional scripts, and compares the two approaches through a series of two-person, cold-read performances. Each performance was judged by a panel of theatre experts. The study finds that Glass has the potential to aid performance by freeing actors to better engage with one another. However, it also found that by limiting the display to one line of script at a time, the Glass application used here makes it difficult for some actors to grasp the text. In a further study, when asked to later perform the text from memory, actors who had used Glass recalled only slightly fewer lines than when they had learned using paper.