The future of ‘video’ in video-based qualitative research is not ‘dumb’ flat pixels! Exploring volumetric performance capture and immersive performative replay

Qualitative research that focuses on social interaction and talk has been increasingly based, for good reason, on collections of audiovisual recordings in which 2D flat-screen video and mono/stereo audio are the dominant recording media. This article argues that the future of ‘video’ in video-based qualitative studies will move away from ‘dumb’ flat pixels in a 2D screen. Instead, volumetric performance capture and immersive performative replay rely on a procedural camera/spectator-independent representation of a dynamic real or virtual volumetric space over time. It affords analytical practices of re-enactment – shadowing or redoing modes of seeing/listening as an active spectation for ‘another next first time’ – which play on the tense relationships between live performance, observability, spectatorship and documentation. Three examples illustrate how naturally occurring social interaction and settings can be captured volumetrically and re-enacted immersively in virtual reality (VR) and what this means for data integrity, evidential adequacy and qualitative analysis.