FEATURED PROJECT
EMBODIED CREATIVITYFaculty: Ali Mazalek, Michael Nitsche, Timothy Welsh, and Sanjay ChandrasekharanTeam Member(s): Geoff Thomas, Tandav Krishna, Meekal Bajaj and Paul Clifton First-year Digital Media Master`s student Paul Clifton introduces the "Embodied Digital Creativity" project. Please briefly explain the project. What is it about? This project aims to create an interface that maps a user`s movements on to an avatar in order to enhance the user`s creativity. Our team is interested in a user`s understanding of his/her relationship to space and the way a body can move. We are building a system that allows both for expression and for analysis of body movement and gesture. The system maps user actions with tangible interfaces onto characters in a real-time virtual environment. Through our body-movement system, we record a matrix of character animations generated by different users. We plan to analyze this matrix in order to find behavioral cluster, and suggest groupings and focal points that can lead to a method of categorization. Using this categorization of traits, we can then complement a particular user's gestures with other participants' strategies for movement. Our expectation is that a user can imagine a wider range of expressive and creative possibilities after seeing other participants' motor biases. Who are the team members? The faculty members are Assistant Professor Ali Mazalek and Assistant Professor Michael Nitsche from School of Literature, Communication, and Culture; Assistant Professor Timothy Welsh and Postdoctoral Fellow Sanjay Chandrasekharan from the University of Calgary. Team members are Digital Media Ph.D. student Geoffry Thomas, Human-Computer Interaction Master`s students Tandav Krishna Sanka and Meekal Bajaj, and myself, Paul Clifton. What is your role in the project? I have mostly been responsible for designing and building the light circuits that we used to create for the images and user testing. How long have you been working on this project? I have started working on this project in the Fall 2008 semester. Spring 2009 is the second semester. How is a day like from this project? I will describe one of the most interesting weeks we had so far. In one week of the fall semester, we built about 30 circuits, which consisted of LEDs, resistors, batteries, and velcro strips so the subjects could wear them. Later that week, users came to our lab, and we started user testing, which consisted of recording users specific movements. We tested eight people in one day. It was a great experience. What are the biggest challenges with this project? The biggest challenges up to this point have been designing and building the system for creating the abstract images of a person`s movements. Using IR, we created many different computer visions. The experimentation for elegant and expandable solutions was frustrating, but it was a good learning experience about the limitations of equipment and time. Why do you like working for this project? The Embodied Digital Creativity project gives me the opportunity to find creative solutions to complex problems in both the technical and theoretical domains. I have learned to design and build simple circuits and found ways to create simple abstractions of a person`s movements. I find the subject, interfaces between the real and virtual, and our perceptions of them interesting and worthwhile for study. Also, I must mention that I work with an excellent team. What are you planning to do in the Spring 2009? In Spring 2009 semester, we're planning to build a puppet that wirelessly transmits data from bend sensors and potentiometers to a computer that maps the puppet's movements on a 3D avatar. Prepared by Tanla Bilir |
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