e-Dance project

They are finally catching up to CSAGE work (Remote recording, annotation and live interraction with stereoscopic video conferencing) from four years ago. Then the key performance was StereoBodies.

Inition, using better quality equipment admittedly but similar principle “Inition and Can Communicate worked with Orange Labs to simulcast the first ever live opera performance in 3D. The performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni took place at Rennes Opera House in Brittany last month and was viewed by a combination of paying and VIP audiences at cinemas in Paris, Avignon and Brest.”

A quick pointer to the “Another Language” newsletter from our friends in Utah: Volume 6 Issue 3 is just out. The next INTERPLAY: EVENT HORIZONS is due in March 26 – April 4, 2010

A series of test were carried out in the recent long intensive. The following shows both screen views of the eDance Scene Editor.

The left hand side is controlled by one console terminal, incorporating all the controls te user sees, and the right hand side (cropped in the image) is the projected view.

I was reminded of a paper from a few years ago visualizing Benesh notation for ballet, via VR (avatar 3D geometry models) the following image is a “pose annotating using Benesh notation of an arabesque posed by a real dancer and virtual ballet dancer”

Reference “Neagle, R. J., Ng, K., & Ruddle, R. A. (2004). Developing a virtual ballet dancer to visualise choreography. Proceedings of the AISB 2004 Symposium on Language, Speech and Gesture for Expressive Characters, 86-97. Leeds, UK: Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour. ISBN 1 902956 39 0.”

Since 2000 there has been analysis of a piece by William Forsythe “One Flat Thing:Reproduced”. This has been, as well as  a large piece of content, a labour of love and extreme hard work – lots appears to be hand created (segmentation, registration etc) and then specific areas selected for specific contect/story.

This was running at the Aesthetics Area of SIGGRAPH in 2009 without anyone present to explain. Check out the SynchronousObjects site that describes effectively 16 different ways to look at the work.

Thursday and Friday at Bedford with most issues over quality with transmitting multiple video streams. Proposed for closed sites to have as many localised nodes as possible. A few initial images from the early rehersals and descriptions follow. There are about a dozen pieces in this forming this structural piece.

Exploring imagery of close, with high contrast movable camera mount.

Multiple distorted and transparent views of the same image, also controlled remotely.

Structure now integrated a vertical camera pointing down to the stage with Google Earth to explore context and zoom interaction.

Final looping-piece involved hand held control of the cameras.

After a longish break, e-Dance is once again in full activity! The Arts Council has provided funding for a five week summer intensive and we are already in the second week of it.

I spent Monday/Tuesday this week in Bedford helping to set up the technical side, installing software, giving an introduction to our software to the person who will operate it during this time. For the rest of the period we in Manchester will be providing telephone support.

A good amount of development was done since we last used the Scene Editor in a live context. So of course some bugs have appeared which I try to fix as soon as possible.

I am looking forward to see the result of this work! Pictures from other bloggers might appear before that.

Following on from the RACE demonstration seesion – we had a discussion of AG, e-Dance and the software recording playback systems across to Drama at University of Manchester.

This included Shantel Ehrenburg, Karen Wood and Dee Reynolds; whose associated work http://www.watchingdance.org/

Two page spread on e-Dance,  e-Curator and Archaeotools in a JISC e-Research/Digital Tools article.

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/inform24.aspx#traditionalsubjects

Issue 24 Spring 2009 – text from Judy Redfearn is above.

“Repository of Access Grid Collaborative Events (RACE) Workshop”
19th February 2009, CS1.10, Kilburn Building, University of Manchester

http://www.rcs.manchester.ac.uk/community/confevents/RACEWorkshop

A short half-day workshop presented various video/AG projects including eDance. Video Conferencing is far more now than just video and audio – but includes interaction with other data formats as well as various ways to present data.

The workshop considered users of video repositories and their use, a questionnare is at:
http://www.rcs.manchester.ac.uk/research/race/usereval

Main RACE web-page:
http://www.rcs.manchester.ac.uk/research/race

The eDance player and editing system was explained in step-by-step detail and demonstrated on a projection system.