Internet 2

Cultivating Communities:  Dance in the Digital Age

Hummingbird

A live dancer  (Chih-Chun Huang) at the University of Southern California danced with images of a fully-articulated avatar animated in real-time by a dancer (Cho-Ying Tsai) in the optical motion tracking system at the Beckman Institute, University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.  The images of the avatar changed to different animated looks and were projected on a semi-transparent screen (scrim) placed between the live dancer and the audience at USC.

Hummingbird is presented with support from the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and the Kyoto School of Computer Science (Kyoto Computer Gakuin); KCG is the first computer technical school in Japan, established in 1963.  

For this performance, we created a shared performance space between Champaign, IL and Los Angeles, CA using motion capture technology by Motion Analysis and custom software called Syzygy.

The resulting raw skeleton data is clothed by a sequence of avatars, as controlled by an operator in Champaign, and the geometry is streamed across the network to display on the stage in Los Angeles.  All media streams are uncompressed to reduce latency to the smallest possible extent, enabling tight interaction between the performers.  Syzygy is a custom middleware system developed at the University of Illinois' Integrated Systems Lab.  This cross-platform system provides the communications infrastructure necessary to rapidly prototype complicated shared virtual environments.  Syzygy includes fault-tolerant networking objects and a framework for creating communications protocols, among other features.  Syzygy focuses on enabling realtime distributed multimedia applications, and, as such, includes native support for audio, video, and 3D graphics.  The Syzygy software is open source and can be downloaded from this website.

Producer and Technology Director-
Hank Kaczmarski

Software Engineering-
Benjamin Schaeffer

Computer Animation-
Lance Chong

Choreography-
Chih-Chun Huang

Dancer at the Bing Theatre-
Chih-Chun Huang

Dancer at the Motion Capture Suite-
Cho-Ying Tsai

Lighting Design-
Mathew Kohnen

Music:  All My Hummingbirds Have Alibis-
by Morton Subotnick, courtesy of Morton Subotnick Videography for the documentary Nathan P. Brown