In addition to the necessity that its performance must be simultaneously "live" and digital, the event's secondary characteristics are that its content should retain some recognizable theatre roles (through limiting the level of interactivity) and a narrative element of spoken language or text.
In the case of mass broadcast, it is essential that this sharing of public space occurs at the site of the primary artistic event.
Digital media is not defined through the presence of one type of technology hardware or software configuration, but by its characteristics of being flexible, mutable, easily adapted, and able to be processed in real-time.
It is the ability to change not only sound and light, but also images, video, animation, and other content into triggered, manipulated, and reconstituted data which is relayed or transmitted in relation to other impulses which defines the essential nature of the digital format.
The criteria of having narrative content through spoken language or text as part of the theatrical event is meant not to limit the range of what is already considered standard theatre (as there are examples in the works of Samuel Beckett in which the limits of verbal expression are tested), but to differentiate between that which is digital theatre and the currently more developed fields of digital dance9 and Art Technology.
In the early 1980s, video, satellites, fax machines, and other communications equipment began to be used as methods of creating art and performance.
Researchers such as Claudio Pinanhez at MIT, David Saltz of The Interactive Performance Laboratory at the University of Georgia, and Mark Reaney head of the Virtual Reality Theatre Lab at the University of Kansas, as well as significant dance technology partnerships (including Riverbed and Riverbed's work with Merce Cunningham) led to an unprecedented expansion in the use of digital technology in creating media-rich performances (including the use of motion capture, 3D stereoscopic animation, and virtual reality as in The Virtual Theatricality Lab's production of The Skriker at Henry Ford Community College under the direction of Dr. George Popovich.
It is in the ideas of artists including Edward Gordon Craig, Erwin Piscator (and to a limited degree Bertolt Brecht in their joint work on Epic Theatre), Josef Svoboda, and the Bauhaus and Futurists movements that we can see the strongest connections between today's use of digital media and live actors, and earlier, experimental theatrical use of non-human actors, broadcast technology, and filmic projections.
The presence of these theatrical progenitors using analog media, such as filmic projection, provides a bridge between Theatre and many of today's vast array of computer-art-performance-communication experiments.