Cycle One–Allison Smith

For my first cycle, I chose to practice with motion tracking and what I can do with that. As a dancer, I was excited to play with how the tech could inspire movement both for dancers and for non dancers. My goal was to track the extremities of the user, right and left hands and feet, and use that tracking to paint lines on a projector screen. Noticing how these experimental systems encourage people to play, I was hoping that people would be intrigued to play and then see what the body can create.

Using a Kinect feeding into the skeleton decoder actor, I was able to get numbers for all of the extremities. I plugged the X and Y coordinates into the live drawing actor, and I plugged the velocity of these coordinates into the hue of the drawing. The goal was that faster movement would be a different color than slower movement, cuing the participant to play with different speeds. I also plugged the velocity of these coordinates into a trigger for adding a point of the drawing, so that when the participant isn’t actively moving their arms, it won’t create unwanted drawings.

This didn’t go as technically smooth as I would’ve wanted it to. The Kinect was finicky and didn’t track more than one extremity at once. It also was glitchy in its tracking, so the movement of the drawing was rigid rather than smooth. It also took a long time to catch the cactus pose of my first individual, which wasn’t the experience I was hoping for. Finally, as much as I played with the numbers, the color changing didn’t pan out the way I wanted it to. I wanted it to look like paint that was blending into different colors, but instead it looks more like an LED light. I’ve attached a video of my demo here:

I received helpful feedback after the demo. It was brought up how the cactus pose experience was turning off other people from volunteering. People also explained that going up by themselves was intimidating, and it might have been more inviting if they were by themselves or if other people could do it with them. I was encouraged to consider my audience and my setting to motivate how I set up the experience. Do I tell people what to do, or do they figure it out themselves? Would having something on the screen before people approached the screen be more inviting than having a black screen to walk up to?

If I were to work further on this project, I would try to make this experience more inviting. Since I am a dancer, it was helpful to hear feedback on how this is intimidating for someone who doesn’t typically move their body in that manner, and it was helpful to hear how to cater this experience differently. I would also try to make this either fully independent of my instruction so people could engage with it in an installation, or fully capable of tracking dance that could be used during a performance. I am not sure if I want to continue to work on this project in the next cycle or the third cycle, but I will keep this feedback in mind for any of my future work.