“Trailhead” Final project update

Reflection

Photo by Alex Oliszewski

I am very pleased with how my final iteration of this project went. Not all of the triggers worked perfectly (the same scene was always finicky, which could have called for some final tweaking), but the interactivity I was looking for occurred.

Please refer to my video documentation of the participants experience and experiments with the light projections:

When I had the opportunity to discuss the participants interactions here is the feedback I received as well as my observations.

• One participant suggested I play with the velocity as a reactive element, using slow as well as fast as options. I explained that this actual was a step in the creation process but I preferred the allure of the constant light. I would like to in the future use the velocity in a different way because I agree it would add a lot of interest to the experience.
•  When I asked them to “paint” the light with their hands, they actually rubbed their hands on the ground not in the air like patch necessitated. I realized after the first cycle of participants that using wording more akin to “conducting” would give them the depth information they would need to interact.
• I found that their impetus after interacting for a while was to use try and use their feet to manipulate the light because the light was projected onto the floor. Giving them information about their vertical depth being a factor of body recognition would have helped them. On the contrary though, I did enjoy watching the discovery process unfold on its own as their legs got higher off the ground and the projection began to appear.
• Another participant, when asked how they decided to move after seeing the experiential media said it was in a way of curiosity. They wanted to ask to test the limits of the interaction.
• The most exciting feedback for me was when a final participant expressed their self-proclaimed ‘non-dancer’ status but said my patch encouraged them to move in new ways. Non movers found themselves moving because of the interest the projection generated. So cool!

I wanted to give the participants a little bit of information about the patch but not too much as to spoon feed it to them. The written prompts worked well, but as stated above, the “paint” wording while poetic was not effective.

Kinect to Isadora 

VUO Connection- Feed Kinect depth data into Isadora

Isadora Patch Details

Scene Names/Organization

“Come to me,” “Take a knee: Paint the light with your hands,” and “A little faster now” were all text prompts that would trigger when a person exited the space to give them instructions for their next interaction. The different “mains” was the actual trailing projection itself, separated into different colors. Finally, the “Fin, back to the top!” screen was simply there for a few seconds to reveal they had reached the end and the patch would loop all over again momentarily. This could potentially cause an infinite loop of interactivity, allowing participants to observe others and find new ways of spreading, interacting, hiding and manipulating the projected light.

I am excited to take this patch, intelligence, feedback forward with me into my dance studies. I am going to integrate a variant of this project immediately into my performance in the Department of Dance’s Winter Concert in February of 2016, of which I have a piece of choreography and soon an experiential projection, in.

Photo by Alex Oliszewski

Fin!