Parachutes. Codes. Disguise. Subversion. Deception. Sabotage. All part of the day-to-day existence of a British secret agent in World War II France. This three part interdisciplinary endeavor—performance, installation, and international symposium—explored interwoven threads of the Special Operations Executive (SOE): theatre artists employed to develop the art and science of camouflage and the role played by women agents in clandestine activity. This multi-media new work offered a fresh, compelling meaning to the expression "theatre of war."

Collaborators on the project included the Department of Theatre and the Advanced Computing Center for Art and Design (ACCAD); with support from the Mershon Center and the College of the Arts and Humanities. ACCAD, in particular Vita Berezina-Blackburn and Matt Lewis, along with the Ohio State Department of Theatre collaborated on an original new stage production, The Camouflage Project. This winter, in preparation for the May 2011 opening, ACCAD staff and graduate students (Jeremy Baker, Tom Heban, Nicole Lemon, Zachary Maynard, Benjamin Schroeder, Cheng Zhang and others) researched techniques involving augmented reality and digital fabrication. These principles were implemented to create real-time virtual reality within the stage performance. Augmented reality draws artificial changes on top of the real world. From table-top to architectural scales, this can be accomplished with special glasses, video screens, or in this approach, with projectors. This technique involves projecting an image of a virtual 3D object onto a matching physical copy of itself. When the virtual and physical copies of the objects' parts are carefully aligned, the physical object will appear normal. But when the virtual version of the object is then animated, the physical object will appear to transform in the real world. It was an exceptional Theatre experience.