The e_Agora project, 2004, was inspired by the work developed around the Virtual Palac Akropolis project and aimed to develop a virtual multimedia platform for innovative production and presentation of Performing Arts. An intended 3D (three-dimensional) environment will use the latest audiovisual technologies in order to interconnect European cultural centres and artistic communities, and to enhance the process of their collaboration on common productions by efficient distribution of realization tasks in the virtual space.

Thanks to interactive and adaptive nature of the e-AGORA platform these new productions will embed and generate original formats of creativity. We aim to stimulate real to create virtual communities active in the field of Performing Arts and provide them with innovative instruments for how to prepare, produce, share, present, exchange, memorize, and disseminate their performances.

The e-AGORA platform will become an experimental ground for realizations of Performing Arts intersecting real and virtual spaces employing multimodal interfaces and techniques of hybrid scenography. Professional operators as well as individual creators will use the platform as a complex tool and network for producing and sharing in a distributed way new artistic expressions.
Various experiments were undertaken during E-agora project combining arts, sciences and technologies in a process of hybridization, fights, rupture, and assertion, rejection of a creative construction and deconstruction of the subject and object ratios, using sensors in reality to interact with the limits of the world and of the meaning. This technological body increase, made it possible to disfigure the real and the virtual scenes, causing aesthetic jolts and chaos, no coherence, causing the emergence of the absent, the vacuum and the gravity, creating dynamic and physical correspondences.

The process lies until now in a conflicted "scenography" of visual and sound heterogeneous fragments with however for recurring objective, the interrelationship of the real and virtual stage. The first experiences / performances have allowed the emergence of explosive mixtures and a possible infinity of combinations detached from any convention. The scenography and dramaturgy questions came up like process and not like illustration, deviating from the spectacular superficiality, affirming a close relation between the stage and the data processing principles.
We had the chance to develop several experiences using magnetic motion capture system, “Polhemus”, to create hybrid relation between dancers, sensors and 3D real time environments.
We developed different interactive 3D environments using VRML/X3D language and the UDK game engine, like the “Vitkov pamatnik 3D” and other experimental creations.

The project ended up with the creation of V.I.R.U.S., presented in the “Vitkov pamatnik” located in Prague, which is one of the first performances, connecting contemporary dance with game technologies. Whereas the implementation of various (camera, magnetic) motion-capturing systems is rather common in the domain of performing arts, the advanced game technologies are still a novelty. Their use in combination with some of the traditional technologies in the field of dance and theatre becomes a pilot enterprise.

Project has been appointed by the European Commission a reference number CLT2004 A1/PA/ CZ -170 in order to be realized within the CULTURE 2000 programme.