For the midterm project, I plan to develop an interactive experimental art project: Dancing with a stranger.
Background:
Dancing with a stranger is an interactive experiment art project that requires two users to participate. The idea is that user A and B’s limb movements will be detected. User A will be in control of the figure A’s arms and figure B’s legs, user B will be in control of figure A’s legs and figure B’s arms. The result will be presented on the screen with a dark starry night background with two glowy figures dancing. Ideally, the webcam can also detect the speed of the users’ feet movements and switch through a set of different songs that match distinctive speeds.
The following photoshopped image illustrates the project. The white dots are used here to demonstrate the joints that will be detected on the users, and they will not appear in the final result.
The yellow figure’s arms and the pink figure’s legs will be the movements of one user; the yellow figure’s legs and the pink figure’s arms will be the movements of the other user.
Motivation:
The idea of this project was inspired by Sam Smith and Normani’s song “Dancing with a stranger”. When I’m listening to this song, it presents me with a picture that even though the two people are not familiar with each other, they are bonded by the music and therefore create a tacit, mutual understanding. In most dual games/ interactive designs, each player is asked to take full control of his/her character, I decided to pursue a different way. What if a person can only control half of the character, and only with the cooperation with another person, can they successfully create a beautiful dance together? That’s how this came to mind.
Reference:
The model inspiration was the “Body, Movement, Language: AI Sketches With Bill T. Jones”. The model is based on the PoseNet model that detects the limbs and the joint of the user. I intended to use this detected coordinates to create the structure of the two glowy figures. Since we need to distinguish between the two users, I intend to restrict the area of detection, which means only the movements within a specific range can be detected and presented on screen. Also, the position of the two glowy figures can’t be stationary since I need to create a dance. I intend to randomize the movement of the head with the torso and the limbs will be attached to the floating torso.