Thoughts on Dance-inspired technology, technology-inspired dance

One thing I had not really given much consideration to before reading this was the audience's perspective. As the author says, "designers of interactive dance must not only design for the dancers’ interaction with the interactive media, but must equally consider the intent of the choreography and how the dance will be experienced by the audience." When working on such short paced projects, it is difficult to see beyond the dancer. What I mean by that is that since dance is such a new medium for me, I use a lot of my effort trying to see how my technology can augment the dancer. However, I haven't really thought much about how the work as a whole is experienced by the audience. One of my goals with computer science is to focus on the user, but hopefully for the final project I will not only see the dancer as the user, but also the audience.

Sketch Two

For Sketch Two, we initially had big plans of having a detailed scene in which there would be a river flowing through a landscape, over which there would be a bridge. The dancer would mostly interact with the bridge, and a flock of birds would accompany her, kind of like in Snow White. Also, like in the Disney movies, she would be creating harmonious music (the reason the birds would join her). However, we scaled it down quite a bit as a result of the very limited time we had. Instead, the premise evolved into having a keyboard projected onto the ground (pictured right) with a flock of music notes on the wall behind the dancer. This time, we wanted the dancer to create harsh, discordant music that would contrast with the music that the music notes were "making", causing them to try to attack her.

The implementation had several roadblocks, mostly due to the limiting factors of using two Kinect systems. We found that it is difficult to get the level of precision we were hoping for. Having two Kinects meant that the data we were getting was noisy and distorted. The network for sending the data and the computers that were acting as the server and clients were also slower than what we wanted. Below is a video showing Michael playing with a prototype.

Sketch 1

So for sketch one, there were some exciting things and some disappointing aspects.

When out group met we fleshed out a vision that we were all very excited about. Unfortunately, many of the things we hoped to implement were, due to time constraints, impossible to implement for sketch one. We also had problems with the scrim. We were hoping to project the entire image onto the scrim, but due to the white background we ended up having double images. In order to cope with this, we altered the animation to make the two images interact.

One of the ways I was really pleased with this project was how we were able to integrate the nature aspect into the imagery. However, the best part of this project was how well the team worked together. All members were enthusiastic and everyone was willing to help out, even outside of their areas of expertise. This led to a working environment that was very conducive to making progress on our goal.

I also was very pleased with how our ideas blended together. We were able to build from our individual influences and make something greater than if we had one singular idea. I am looking forward to developing this system further for the final project.

Inspiration

Reading Assignment: Live Media: Interactive Technology and Theatre by David Z. Saltz

In this article, David Saltz talks about using technology to aid a theater performance by giving the performers a way to interact with technology. First, he gives a definition of interactive media by outlining three key principles:

• Random access
• An arbitrary link between trigger and output
• Media manipulation

These serve to highlight the distinction between interactive media and simply using technology in a performance.

Shaw then turns to his own examples of using interactive media, through his lab at the University of Georgia. My favorite of these was his interpretation of the play Hair. He used interactive media to enhance the trippy drug induced hallucinations.

I thought this was such an effective example because it does a great job of enhancing the performance by augmenting what the viewer sees with what the actor is portraying.

Saltz then turns his focus to the relationship between the performer and the media. Although he cautions that it is not exhaustive, he gives us a great list of possible interactions:

• Virtual Scenery
• Interactive Costumes
• Alternate Perspective
• Subjective Perspective
• Illustration
• Commentary
• Diegetic Media
• Affective Media
• Synesthesia
• Instrumental Media
• Virtual Puppetry
• Dramatic Media

This list is something I will definitely turn to while working in this class because it presents some very insightful ways to use the techniques we will be developing.

Past Work

My passion is creating intuitive user interfaces. For that reason, what I want to show to represent my aesthetic and style are the projects I have been able to spend the time developing an easy to use and beautiful interface. Unfortunately, those projects are no longer my intellectual property because they were created while I was at internships, so I can not demo them or upload them for you to see.

I do, however, have a picture of a presentation I did for Valero about my program:

I hope that you can see that I prefer a clean, somewhat minimalist style that emphasizes making the object the user want to interact with salient. I do this because I think if a user has an easy time finding what they are looking for they will have a positive feeling towards my program.

Introduction

My name is Andy Hurley, and I am a junior computer science student. My main interest is in designing intuitive, easy to use user interfaces. Since user interfaces are starting to incorporate interactive technologies, I hope that what I learn in this class can be used to help my career.

I have not seen a lot of live dance, but I do occasionally go two stepping, so here is a video of our very own Texas A&M Aggie Wranglers, doing one of their routines: