Problem Statement

Team

Rachel Dodell, Mina Oh, Maddie Kim
OhKiDoKi

Problem

Our project expands an average person’s artistic toolset by enabling an individual to create art through movement — which allows for a more accessible platform for an audience that was excluded from creating their own pieces through traditional methods. Our goal is to make walking, running, dancing, and other forms of movement into a richer artistic expression by create a visualization and a creative experience through our interface. TRACE allows users to preserve represent and preserve their movements in a beautiful visualization keepsake.

Users

We envision two primary user classes, which we call “performance users” and “casual users.”

Performance users include those who consider themselves to be athletes, whether professionally or recreationally: dancers, runners, tennis players, etc. These performance users are skilled in their exercise of choice. They are excellence-driven and value their performances/games/runs. They would use the TUI during their performance/run/game for the set duration. Aside from dancers, they likely don’t consider their movement as “art.” The user classes’ age group typically includes from young adult to older adult.

Casual users consist of the “average joes” who do not consider themselves to be athletes or artists. They are not necessarily skilled in either arena. They are interested in creativity/art and may use the TUI anywhere, whether going about their daily lives or for specific occasions and activities (such as dances, fitness activities, fun leisure activity, etc.). Their age group is also mostly adults, ranging from young to old.

Proposed Solution

Our proposed solution is a smart sensor that can be located in the footwear of choice and will send information to an interface that will generate marks that pertain to the movement of that day and/or activity. The user, with intentionality, will choose a certain activity that they would like to record through visual marks. Upon completing the activity, they will find the visual information drawn onto a blank digital canvas where they can decide if they would like to print, project, or create something with the piece. The tangible item of choice would be a shoe because they are worn on the body everyday, and particularly on the feet which are the main contributors of movement on the body. A small sensor that is easily placed in and also taken out of the shoe allows the user the freedom to decide which type of shoe would be applicable to the activity they would like to record.

Related Work

Related Work 1: Dance-Inspired Technology, Technology-Inspired Dance

“Dance-Inspired Technology, Technology-Inspired Dance” is a project by Berto Gonzalez, Erin Carroll, and Celine Latulipe at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Their research team focused on integrating choreography, media, interactivity into dance pieces by producing six different dance pieces over the course of four years. Their work differs from ours since it focuses on integrating visual interactions during a dance performance. The users of their work include both dancers and audience members. Dancers hold sensor devices in their hands during a show, and as a result, their gestural movement is tracked and displayed as interactive art as a backdrop to the live performance.

Their team worked with five design principles: connected kinetics, augmented expression, aesthetic harmony, interactive build, and integrated process. Connected kinetics refers to the fact that audience members “should be able to tell that dancers’ movements control, manipulate, or influence the kinetics of the visualizations.” Augmented expression is the idea that the visualizations, and the technology that powers them, should “enrich the mediums of expression available” and/or “provide entirely new mediums of expression.” Aesthetic harmony refers to the fact that the visualizations should complement the movement of the dancers in order to create a pleasing aesthetic quality. Interactive build similarly relates to the aesthetics of the interface; the intensity, variability, and other factors of the visualization should “progress throughout the dance to match the build of the choreography.” Finally, the integrated process addresses the collaboration between technologists and choreographers; both should work together to influence the design process of the physical movements, as well as the resulting digital interface. Our team intends to use these principles to guide our project, as we affirm that our digital product should be a representation of physical inputs.

However, our resulting work will strongly differ from that of this paper. As the UNC-Charlotte team notes, “the domains of theater and music performance have temporal constraints and audience relations similar to formal concert dance.” However, since our project users are not limited to dancers — and the use of our proposed tangible interface can occur anywhere — the same limitations do not apply. Our users will have the device in their shoe, and do not need to be professional dancers in order to create a digital representation of their movement. Furthermore, the gestural movements of our users and the resulting interactive art do not need to occur in the same physical location. Our users can complete their tangible input anywhere, and then view their interactive art from an additional location.

Related Work 2: Canvas Dance: An Interactive Dance Visualization for Large-Group Interaction

“Canvas Dance: An Interactive Dance Visualization for Large-Group Interaction” is a project from Carla Griggio and Mario Ramero of KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Their team focused on creating a visualization platform for non-professional dancers that could be used in a social setting (i.e. a nightclub). The project uses inputs from a network of mobile phones, worn in the back pocket of a user’s pants, to track the movement of each dancer. Using the tracked motion, the interactive display shows a sphere for each user, as well as circular sparks of colors in relation to movement; for example, when a user swings their hips left, the sphere moves to the left and has sparks of color fly off the right. This display is placed next to the dance floor so that users can see the results of their movement in real-time; as a result, dancers are encouraged to participate in the social experience.


Our project will differ from the Canvas Dance work, since our device is to be used by both professional athletes (including dancers) and laypersons. Instead of focusing on the overall movements, our device will focus on movement and variables relating to the feet — including pressure, location, and speed. Furthermore, our tangible input and digital output devices will not necessarily be located in the same place. Instead, we envision that a user could view the output of their motion anywhere. In terms of the aesthetic quality, our output will differ depending on the user — unlike the Canvas Dance; we intend to use different variables to represent different types of movement. For example, a ballet dancer’s digital output may be neutral in tone and a involve graceful gestures, while a jazz dancer’s output may have rich jewel tones and gestural lines.

Related Work 3: The New Nike+ Is a Futuristic Sensor That Brings the Power of Nike's Research Labs to Your Shoes

The Nike+ sensor is a smart sensor that was designed by Nike, and uses an accelerometer and pressure sensor, to track certain activities. The sensor is synced with a mobile phone application that displays a user’s statistics, like how high they’ve jumped or how far they’ve run. The device is intended as an accessible method of tracking an athlete's training and progress, and helps athletes understand their physical inputs in a digital output. While we do not intend our interface to serve training athletes, Nike+’s sensor tracks several variables we are interested in: pressure, distance, and height. A similar sensor will be employed in our project in order to track the movement of not only athletes and dancers, but also everyday people. However, instead of using numbers as a visual indicator of these user’s inputs, we are interested in representing individual factors with an artistic output. Each factor will correspond with a particular visual quality (i.e. the higher the pressure, the thicker a line). 

Related Work 4: E-Traces Ballet Shoe

Electronic Traces is a technological pointe shoe that allows ballet dancers to recreate their movements in digital pictures using a mobile application. The concept is based on capturing dance movements and transforming them into visual sensations through the use of new technologies. The ballet shoes, through the contact with the ground, record the pressure and movement of the dancer’s feet and send a signal to an electronic device. The application will then show this data graphically and even customize it to suit the user, through different functions on the app. Through this, dancers can interpret their own movements, correct them, and/or compare them with movements of other dancers.

This work differs from ours in that the focus is solely on ballet dancers and graphical representations of live performances. Live performances imply that the user is already an artist through the way they perform, which limits the scope of people such a tool has the ability to reach. It also differs in that the selected pointe shoes already come with the technology sewn into them - this requires users to actually buy the entire shoe along with the application. Through our project, we want to widen the scope of users, grant users the freedom to create regardless of location, and not limit the representations to a performance of some sort.

Related Work 5: NUVE: In Between the Analog and Virtual Body

NUVE is an artistic project that aims to explore the artistic possibilities offered by the digital dance performances in the interaction between the individual and his virtual double. It stems from work that explores body interaction and expressive gestures to compose immersive audio and visual flows supporting artistic expressiveness. In NUVE, the body supplies the first engine of action, and the choreographic body evolves into a relation with its own “virtual double” in a way to create a dialog challenging the choreographic boundaries. At some point, the “virtual body” detaches itself from the performer and the choreography evolves. Using openFrameworks, it relies on an infrared firewire camera to capture the image of the stage 30 frames per second. Infrared lights are employed to obtain the best possible image of the dancer. A combination of standard image processing techniques is used to capture the silhouette and the movement of the performer.

Rather than our plans to record movement in a visual way, the creators of NUVE strived to present (rather than record) a double of a full body. There are similarities in both our projects that seek to support artistic expressiveness in dynamic and personable ways - but the way that NUVE goes about it shows their focus is on dancers and users who already think intentionally about choreography. Our project, on the other hand, seeks to reach even the most amateur user, who simply wants an outlet to express creative freedom through movement of any sort.