Encounters: Collective Bodies, Creative Spaces
Project overview:
Encounters is an interactive digital art installation, it was collaboration between Victorian College of Arts (VCA) and Microsoft SocialNUI. Encounters was a part of Melbourne’s SummerSalt Festival and White Night 2015.
We created a large installation called Encounters that explored the world of human-computer interaction. The project was created in highly collaborative manner, there were 31 people in the team all came from wide range of technical and art backgrounds including visual arts, composition, dance, lighting, interactivity, computer vision, and computer science.
The installation consist of a Microsoft Kinect placed over-head. We built software to track people while dancing, the software can recognise several types of movements such as walking, running, crouching, and jumping. As the audience entered the space Microsoft Kinect sensors detected their presence, triggering sounds and lighting effects based on not only what participants were doing but what they’re doing relative to everybody else. Every audience member was represented on the screen. Particular actions will change that representation. So if audience members jumped or came together with other people the way they were represented changed. Approximately 1200 people went through the installation over four Saturday nights.
Project team
John Downs, Zaher Joukhadar, Travis Cox, Diego Giraldes, Manoel Ribeiro, Juliano Rotta, and others
Technologies:
My role in the project:
I was responsible for the technical and software development side of the project, I worked with four of SocialNUI colleagues and interns on developing Kinect based software to detect people dancing and recognise their dance movements, the software sends data using OSC to the other parts of the installation such as visuals, lighting, and audio.