Cycle 3–Allison Smith

Posted: April 28, 2022 | Author: Alison Smith | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: dance, Interactive Media, Isadora |1 Comment »

I had trouble determining what I wanted to do for my Cycle 3 project, as I was overwhelmed with the possibilities. Alex was helpful in guiding me to focus on one of my previous cycles and leaning into one of those elements. I chose to follow up with my Cycle 1 project that had live drawing involved through motion capture of the participant. This was a very glitchy system, though, so I decided to take a new approach.

In my previous approach of this, I utilized the skeleton decoder to track the numbers of the participants’ hands. These numbers were then fed into the live drawing actor. The biggest problem with that, though, is that the skeleton would not track well and the lines didn’t correspond to the person’s movement. In this new iteration, I chose to use a camera, eyes ++ and the blob decoder to track a light that the participant would be holding. I found this to be a much more robust approach, and while it wasn’t what I had originally envisioned in Cycle 1, I am very happy with the results.

I had some extra time and spontaneously decided to add another layer to this cycle, where the participant’s full body would be tracked with a colorful motion blur. With this, they would be drawing but we would also see the movement the body was creating. I felt like this addition leaned into my research in this class of how focusing on one type of interactive system can encourage people to move and dance. With the outline of the body, we were able to then see the movement and dancing that the participant’s probably weren’t aware they were doing. I then wanted to put the drawing on a see-through scrim so that the participant would be able to see both visuals being displayed.

A few surprises came when demonstrating this cycle with people. I instructed that viewers could walk through the space and observe however they wanted, however I didn’t consider how their bodies would also be tracked. This brought out an element of play from the “viewers” (aka the people not drawing with the light) that I found most exciting about this project. They would play with different ways their body was tracked and would get closer and farther from the tracker to play with depth. They also played with shadows when they were on the other side of the scrim. My original intention with setting the projections up the way that they were–on the floor in the middle of the room–was so that the projections wouldn’t mix onto the other scrims. I never considered how this would allow space for shadows to join in the play both in the drawing and in the bodily outlines. I’ve attached a video that illustrates all of the play that happened during the experience:

Something that I found interesting after watching the video was that people were hesitant to join in at first. They would walk around a bit, and they eventually saw their outlines in the screen. It took a few minutes, though, for people to want to draw and for people to start playing. After that shift happened, there is such a beautiful display of curiosity, innocence, discovery, and joy. Even I found myself discovering much more than I thought I could, and I’m the one who created this experience.

The coding behind this experience is fairly simple, but it took a long time for me to get here. I had one stage for the drawing and one stage for the body outlines. For the drawing, like I mentioned above, I used a video in watcher to feed into eyes ++ and the blob decoder. The camera I used was one of Alex’s camera as it had a manual exposer to it, which we found out was necessary to keep the “blob” from changing sizes when the light moved. The blob decoder finds bright points in the video, and depending on the settings of the decoder, it will only track one bright light. This then fed into a live drawing actor in its position and size, with a constant change in the colors.

For the body outline, I used an astra orbec tracker feeding into a luminance key and an alpha mask. The foreground and mask came from the body with no color, and the background was a colorful version of the body with a motion tracker. This created the effect of having a white colored silhouette with a colorful blur. I used the same technique for color in the motion blur as I did with the live drawing.

I’m really thankful for how this cycle turned out. I was able to find some answers to my research questions without intentionally thinking about that, and I was also able to discover a lot of new things within the experience and reflecting upon it. The biggest takeaway I have is that if I want to encourage people to move, it is beneficial to give everyone an active roll in exploration rather than having just one person by themselves. I was focused too much on the tool in my previous cycles (drawing, creating music) rather than the importance of community when it comes to losing movement inhibition and leaning into a sense of play. If I were to continue to work on this project, I might add a layer of sound to it using MIDI. I did enjoy the silence of this iteration, though, and am concerned that adding sound would be too much. Again, I am happy with the results of the cycle, and will allow this to influence my projects in the future.

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