I watched an AR play. It made me feel more connected to real reality

I took off my shoes to enter the theater space. My glasses too. The shoes were part of the ritual, but it turns out that An Ark, an augmented reality theater piece presented at The Shed in New York, uses Magic Jump 2 glasses. And these don’t work with my prescription. I put on contact lenses in the bathroom before the show.

In a carpeted room with dozens of people sitting in a circle, I put on the attached pair of AR glasses. So does everyone else. We sat together as holographic artists, including the famous actor Ian McKellen, manifested around us.

An Ark is an experience presented as “the first room created for mixed reality”. I saw AR experiences in immersive showcases before that that I would call plays of sorts. But An Ark’s nearly 50-minute runtime is probably the longest I’ve ever spent in a Magic Leap 2 headset. By the end, the glasses felt a little hot on my nose. I was ready to take them off.

My colleague Bridget Carey and I attended An Ark, which ran at the Shed until April 4, on a bitterly cold day a few weeks ago. I still think about it. The experience was haunting. Emotional, but cold. It was as if we were at a live theater event, and yet there were no live actors.

What does this mean for the future of physical theater? I certainly don’t want live actors to disappear. I don’t think that’s the intention of this piece either. The whole experience is presented as a memory meditation on the liminal space after death.

Four (virtual) chairs appear in a semi-circle in front of me, and one by one, the volumetrically captured actors appear. McKellen, Golda Rosheuvel, Arinzé Kene and Rosie Sheehy are mesmerizing as presences who feel like they are sitting right in front of me. It’s eye contact, as Bridget will tell me later. It’s also the feeling that they’re all fighting for your attention.

My field of vision on the glasses is only enough for about two of the four chairs. I turn my head back and forth to see what the others are doing. The actors talk to me, just to me, look me in the eyes, tell me their stories: do they know me? Do I know them?

Everyone in the theater space feels like they have these four actors sitting in front of them. It is a simultaneous illusion. But I don’t see what others see: I just see them sitting in a semi-circle in front of me. This multiplicity may seem strange, but it succeeds here. We end up feeling like we’re all witnessing together.

We also share the same ambient sound. I realize halfway through that the sound of the full room I was hearing, of them being there with me, is also there for everyone else. At least I think we are. I’m pretty sure we are.

Why it seemed deep…and messy

Even in 2026, I haven’t seen many moments where augmented reality replaces the real thing. AR glasses have a challenge that’s never been tackled before: How do you make a virtual experience that you see in the real world integrate safely and comfortably with everyone else who is also there and probably isn’t seeing the exact same thing in their glasses?

The problem is compounded by the fact that AR glasses aren’t something most people have much experience with. Mixed reality headsets like the Apple Vision ProTHE Samsung Galaxy and the current line of Metaquest headsets can create a mixed reality that makes it feel like you’re in your space with you, but no one wears them in public.

Magic Leap was a first innovator trying to make things happen in AR. The producer of this show, Todd Eckert, was previously responsible for content development for Magic Leap.

He has produced two other theatrical experiences based on Magic Leap material in the past: The Life (in an art installation featuring Marina Abramović) and Kagami (an AR concert piece performed with Ryuichi Sakamoto). An Ark seems to be an extension of the idea and a challenge for us to think about how we might accept the virtual presentation of real actors. It’s something of an inversion of the present moment: while AI is showing us so many artificially generated videos of people, here I saw a virtual presentation of very real acting. I felt the difference.

Setting up a closed theater event for shared moments like The Ark is a step in the right direction. But I also don’t know if this type of experience, over time, will still be interesting when the novelty of AR glasses is lost. Looking around, I got the impression that people were trying out technology that they had never really used before. Walking out of the 45-minute show and walking through a door to collect our stored shoes, I felt like I was walking out of a ritual.

Couldn’t I do this at home instead? Yes, but would it be the same, me alone in my cluttered space without the joy of sharing it with others? That’s the problem. Even though this 45-minute, $45 show required me to travel to West Manhattan on a cold evening, it also made me feel virtually together. We’re still not in a world where most people have the hardware to make this happen, let alone come together to use it together.

But it was also the performances, seen from an intimate distance, that had an impact. I’ve worked with holographic trainers in Meta Quest, but it feels special to see this type of virtual presence in a clean, uncluttered space designed to receive it.

I’d like it more if I didn’t have to bring my own contact lenses, but that’s the current reality of smart glasses. Very few smart glasses are designed to support all types of prescriptions, and many don’t fit over glasses. The show did have prescription inserts to help people, but only up to -5. Bridget’s -6 prescription could not be fully met either.

After, strangely, a hunger for reality

What An Ark did, however, was make me feel grounded in an experience in a real space. I remember being in that room and seeing the people. I take off my shoes. Feel present.

And in the show itself, as the four actors—angels or spirits between the worlds of life and death, perhaps—begin to share memories of lives once lived, memories that blend and merge and represent many people, perhaps I, too, felt as if a message was being conveyed to me. I walked through the door, leaving the show happy to be alive and happy to have made the trip to a place to see theater – even without the actors. Was that the whole idea? Maybe the ark is made of us.

I’ve found myself thinking more about the real world as I delve deeper into personal wearable technology that attempts to connect and transform the world around me. The real world is stable, tangible and rich. I want to pay attention to it. An arch allows me to do this while being virtual, which is magical in itself.