Hannu Järvensivu

Hannu Järvensivu’s responsibilities at the Finnish National Opera and Ballet include being the assistant head of the set workshop, management of the technical engineering team, and project management for the XR Stage project. He will be presenting the XR Stage Design Platform tool and project at the conference.

The XR Stage project concentrates on solving quality and scheduling problems in the design and planning work of performing arts productions by introducing a new online, remote workspace. The scope of the project is to create a fully functional digital twin of the real stage, integrate it to lighting and technical stage operation systems, and create a toolset for sketching and trialing the set and scenes, pre-program lights and have a dry-run for the changes.

This enables the artistic teams to visualize the production already in the early phase, to reduce risk of misinterpretation. It also saves a lot of energy and time from travelling. The digital outcome of the work can be adopted to the technical engineering, which enables a smooth start for the engineering and manufacturing.

In addition to streamlining the production process, XR Stage is a key technical enabler for exploiting the opportunities that virtualization can bring to live performances. Capturing motions of the performers and presenting that data to the audience either as an enhancement to the live show, or as an independent entity through any channel (such as a metaverse experience) open up vast new territories for creating totally new experiences to spectators.

Hannu Järvensivu has long-term experience in the software projects and SW asset management from the telco-IT industry. Before joining the FNOB he had a 18 year-long career in different positions at the Nokia corporation.