Radical Bodies – Dance in VR
Do some workout for your body and coding skills by creating your own next generation version of Japanese dancing machines.
What happened in the workshop?
We created a Virtual Reality based dance experience with user motion tracking and point cloud streaming over ethernet.
Who was the target audience of the workshop?
Interaction and game designers interested in VR development, the combined usage of Kinect and VR, streaming point cloud data, or YCAM’s R&D project ‘Reactor for Awareness in Motion’.
How was the workshop structured?
- We demonstrated samples in the beginning.
- Then we examined basic techniques in VR development (with and without Head-Mounted-Displays), calibrated VR and Kinect coordinate spaces, and synchronized music and visuals with OSC.
- We prepared some short music for performance, and templates of vvvv modules and effects to build upon.
What did attendees of the workshop learn?
- Calibrating different coordinate spaces
- Creating a custom plugin to boost your performance
- Deforming point clouds and skeleton data via patch or shader
The workshop used multiple performance stages in the classroom as setup. Each stage had an Oculus Rift and a Kinect. The stages wetr connected via LAN, so you could choose single player or multiple player.
What is the ‘Radical Bodies’?
It’s our research theme but also title of an installation we did this year in Japan.
Photo Credits:
Photo: Shintaro Yamanaka (Qsyum!)
Courtesy of Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM]