A director-gated simulation paradigm for bringing rehearsed stage worlds into live performance production.
Sim-to-Stage is to live performance what Sim-to-Real is to robotics: simulate, validate, gate, and transfer.
Sim-to-Stage formalizes the discipline of producing a live performance the way modern robotics produces a deployed policy. The production is represented as an authoritative, director-gated artifact across all departments. It is rehearsed end-to-end in a simulation environment. Specialist contributions — lighting, sound, video, scenic, blocking — are reconciled through director-mediated confirmation gates. The validated rehearsal is compiled into one-shot executable artifacts for the live stage.
Like the Sim-to-Real gap in robotics, the Sim-to-Stage gap is not a single phenomenon but a structural collection of distinct sub-gaps. The position paper identifies seven: timing variability, director authority, multi-modal coherence, human execution, one-shot deployment, long-horizon narrative, and aesthetic judgment. Each admits independent research. None is solved.
The paradigm is intended to be larger than any single implementation. StageR is currently in active development as one such implementation; external research groups, theater companies, and live-production implementers are invited to instantiate the paradigm independently.
This is a position paper and paradigm proposal, not a claim that the Sim-to-Stage gap has been solved. The seven sub-gaps named in paper.md are open research directions; the seven architecture primitives are one useful decomposition, not the only one. Subsequent revisions are expected to be substantial.