“Have You Ever Had a Digital Milkshake Before?” presented by Cabe

Since 2021, OnBoardXR has been a festival platform for new short, live, theatrical performances based in a virtual reality space created in a customised fork of Mozilla Hubs. The OnBoardXR (OBXR) festival founders intentionally use the concepts of theatri-cality and live performance to engage virtual audiences using thea-tre etiquette, interpretation, and participation; simultaneously, over three years, the producers have also developed a project creation method mixing software development life cycles (SDLC) into the traditional theatrical rehearsal process. Performance creators typi-cally focus on software development in the early weeks, then tran-sition to more traditional co-present theatre tech/dress rehearsals in the week before the performances. This allows international multi-disciplinary artists to work together both asynchronously and in computer-based ‘real-time’ through recorded rehearsal and devel-opment videos, Discord messages and tags, and livestreaming. Frictions align with liveness in both co-present performance and real-time online technology – both human memory and internet connections can falter. In this article, I analyse each step in the process by comparing to traditional theatre production and SDLC; this analysis demonstrates a successful method of making online, virtual, interactive, live performances across multiple chronological formats, thus offering a formula for other artists in this space.