In a world first, the Canberra Theatre Studio Centre and the Captioning Studio have collaborated to release a smartphone theatre captioning app.
The app was created for Deaf and hearing impaired persons and offers open and closed captioning at the Canberra Theatre Centre. Patrons will be able to access the captions through their smartphones while they're sitting in the theatre.
The captions themselves will be restricted to being viewed only by patrons in the relevant theatre, and feature, according to the Captioning Studio press release, "some extremely clever features which make the technology suitable for the live theatre environment".
ACT Government Minister for the Arts and Comunity Services Joy Burch said that the technology was "a genuine world first, allowing Deaf and hearing impaired patrons to access live theatre captions directly on smartphones and mobile devices when attending captioned performances."
Go Theatrical themselves have become, since their launch in 2005, Australia's first choice at live captioning in theatres across Australia. Co-founder Nari Jennings said: "We're excited about the launch of our latest theatre captioning technology. By offering simultaneous open and closed captioning in this way, patrons with a hearing loss have a choice as to how they access their theatre captions, and that's just fantastic!"
While some may dismiss smartphone apps as toys, nothing more than an entire store made up of Angry Birds, the reality is that apps are using smartphones to make technology for daily life both easily accessible and portable.
From educational apps like Apple's move to take university online to apps that help you with your online banking to apps designed to help children with autism in communication and learning, apps now have the power to be transformative. Go Theatrical! is another app in a (hopefully) long line of things to come that will transform and assist everyone in the technological utopia that we like to pretend our future will be.
Go Theatrical! will make its onstage debut this March with Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.
If you want to get in on the smartphone app action, have a look at some of the plans available for some of Australia's favourite smartphones: the Apple iPhone 4S 64GB, the Apple iPhone 3GS 8GB, or, to try something different, the brand new HTC Velocity 4G.
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