Smartphones played a key supporting role in James Graham’s “Privacy,” at the Public Theater, too, demonstrating — sometimes uncomfortably — how much could be gleaned about a randomly gathered group of theater fans by the devices they carried in their pockets.

Digital wizardry in ‘The Tempest’

Working with Intel and a motion-capture company founded by Andy Serkis (Gollum from “Lord of the Rings” trilogy), the Royal Shakespeare Company featured an unusually shape-shifting Ariel in its 2017 production of “The Tempest.”

Mark Quartley, the actor playing Ariel, appeared both onstage and, at moments when his character referred to magic, as a digitally created avatar, filmed live and projected onto screens moving over fellow actors.

More ‘Object’ lessons

Sensorium, the company that oversaw the technical direction on “Hamlet 360,” also helped to develop “objects in mirror AR closer than they appear,” an extension of Geoff Sobelle’s acclaimed one-man show “The Object Lesson.”

Presented at New York Theater Workshop and at the Tribeca Film Festival, the piece gave viewers the chance to wander through sections of Mr. Sobelle’s clutter-filled set and, using smartphone technology, watch and learn more about what was inside the many boxes and drawers — further fleshing out, visually and aurally, what Ben Brantley in The New York Times called the “connective poetry in the seeming randomness of what we hoard.”