CHAPTER 5
 CONCLUSION

 5.1 Usefulness to the Acting Community

 It has been shown that virtual environments allow multiple actors to successfully

rehearse scenes without the need to be in makeup or costume. The true usefulness of this

system to the acting community lies in the fact that it can bring actors together from two

remote locations for an engaging acting experience. A fully developed virtual rehearsal

system could save actors a significant amount of time and money. The system, however,

is far from being fully developed.

 5.2 Future Work

 The distributed virtual rehearsal system has many areas that can be improved.

The depth of an actor's experience in a virtual rehearsal is greatly affected by how

realistic their interaction is. Realistic interaction is achieved by making the digital

characters' movements as life-like as possible.

 One main complaint from the study participants was that the character they were

facing lacked expression. Implementing interactive facial expressions would be costly

but would dramatically increase the realism of the experience. In Acting in Virtual

Reality, simple mouse strokes were used to change the character's expression [3],

however that solution isn't plausible if the actor is to remain wireless (as they are in the

virtual rehearsal system). Another solution would be to incorporate a third web-camera

into the system that would provide images of the actor's face to a PC that could detect