University of California Los Angeles delivers an immersive theater experience with AWS generative AI services

This post was co-written with Andrew Browning, Anthony Doolan, Jerome Ronquillo, Jeff Burke, Chiheb Boussema, and Naisha Agarwal from UCLA.

The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is home to 16 Nobel Laureates and has been ranked the #1 public university in the United States for 8 consecutive years. The Office of Advanced Research Computing (OARC) at UCLA is the technology expansion partner to the research enterprise, providing both intellectual and technical know-how to turn research into reality. The UCLA Center for Research and Engineering in Media and Performance (REMAP) approached OARC to build a set of AI microservices to support an immersive production of the musical, Xanadu.

REMAP’s production of Xanadu, in collaboration with the UCLA Department of Theater’s Ray Bolger Musical Theater program, was designed to be an immersive, participatory performance during which the audience collaboratively created media by using mobile phone gestures to draw images ...