The digital performance between user experience design and the metaverse

The Metaverse is now a highly performative, interactive and community-based ecosystem. It represents a fundamental shift in today's notion of 'being online', redefining the boundaries between physical and virtual, private and collective, human and more than human. Before and after the pandemic, it has emerged as a crucial site of social experience, facilitating conversations, creative projects and collective interactions. Can it, therefore, be conceived as a Fifth Wall, a virtual theatròn where digital performances are staged? This article proposes an analysis of digital performances presented in 3D virtual online environments, following the user experience design approach: by proposing Martin Romeo's performance "Humanverse" on Spatial (2023) as a case study, the influence of the chosen technological system on the poetics of this type of virtual event will be identified. This contribution proposes to determine the mental model, the kind of interactive experience Romeo proposed to the audience, and why. How he designed this human computer interaction system to create the collective performative action and scenic environment and whether these choices could generate a narrative dramaturgy.