Unrestricted Dance:
The project is aimed at communicating music and dance while people can generate their own designs of dancing with the provided music and frames unconsciously. Through quick music making users without hesitation when enjoying the project, it is expected to demonstrates how human movements can vary from each other under the same conditions provided.
When the music is played on, the project presents a large screen with a series of bubbles on it and user will follow the strings to pop the bubbles, which will finally connect together and make up of an entire dance of a song. Throughout the whole process, users are able to dance in their own way while they only need to pop the bubbles, which will assist them in forming the basic dance frame. After the user dancing throughout the song, screen will show how many bubbles they have popped. The patterns of bubbles will be shown by projectors on white or wooden boards and sensors will be fixed at center of all the bubbles appearing. To accomplish the project, I plan to first test all the equipments needed to ensure they can give the effects that I want. Then I plan to finish the codes by testing whether one bubble can show and disappear if users pop one physically before next Monday. Then I will design the entire bubble pattern and compose all the codes while connecting the circuits before next Thursday. During the user test on Friday, I will communicate with others to fix problems of my present project and improve the interaction part.
As I explained abut my current plan of this project, it actually provides a series of interaction between user and project, where users need to constantly follow the track of bubbles and generate their own style of dancing. The showing of the final result also adds more fun into the project. The uniqueness of this project is that it builds a fundamental frame of dancing but still leave users spaces for their own designing, which changes it from a simple game into a project that presents how human movements are generated by themselves in unconscious circumstances. The previous similar projects are dance machines which users can dance to the music according to the instruction on the machine to move their feet. This project chooses to give hints about the moving direction of users’ arms by popping bubbles, which is quite different from previous dance projects. The audiences of this project are all the people who have interests in dancing and especially people who want to dance but have not taken any dance lessons. Because they tend to generate more natural movements while professional dancers tend to integrate their dancing skills into enjoying the project. Further development are adding more elements to decorate the screen to make it more like a stage, where users can enjoy more about dancing in front of others.