Sean Jasin, an Electrical Engineering major, along with his fellow student Luke Liu, has been working on a new, low-cost solution for full body tracking in VR. This will help us to integreate more of the body into our movement explorations with the movement games in Master Dancer.
This video short shows the data coming from the sensor into the computer via WiFi. The cable that connects the breadboard to the computer is there simply to provide power, which eventually would be supplied via a small li-po battery:
Professor Toenjes took the Master Dancer demo app as it stands now to the Digital Research in Humanities and the Arts 2023 conference at the University of Turin, Italy. The team worked very hard to get the app working in time for the conference in early September. The app was presented every day at the conference for two hours, and happy to say, it ran flawlessly the whole time!
Performing Cultural Heritage in the Digital Present
Fig.1 – A person using a VR headset in the library at the University of Turin, Italy during the 2023 DRHA conference.
The title of the conference was “Performing Cultural Heritage in the Digital Present.” The Master Dancer app fit perfectly into this theme, as Master Dancer focuses on the dancer Loie Fuller as its main character. The app is delivered to the headset via a cable from a PC, and the University of Turin generously provided a powerful laptop for me to use.
Below is a video of the current version of the app as seen through the headset. We are currently in discussion with Dan Cermak and his team of student developers at the ST/UDIO to work on another revision to the app based upon feedback received while watching people engage with this version. This will be detailed in another post…
