"Master Dancer" Virtual Reality application: currently under development

A virtual reality adventure/activity, Master Dancer is being developed as a template for learning about historical personages through contextualizing them, through interaction with their virtual avatar, and through exploring and learning aspects of their work through game play. Master Dancer is the first of these historical adventure/activities. It features the dancer and theatrical innovator Loïe Fuller, whom we consider a pioneer of technology-based dance theater.

This is a work-in-progress; the following describes some of the current state as well as a vision for the eventual final state.

After the introduction, the user explores the lobby of a “Folies-Bergère” theater in Paris, where Fuller made her name. In the lobby, various historical items are seen: a gallery of posters of Fuller by artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec, videos of dances by Fuller and her imitators, and a gallery of collaborators and artists who were in her sphere, such as composer Florent Schmitt and poet Stéphane Mallarmé. These will function in the virtual world as quest markers, which lead to a virtual encounter by the user with a virtual Loïe Fuller.

Virtual Loie explains that awakening the creative spirit is what maintains this magical theater, and she is counting on the user to contribute to it by learning how to unleash their movement creativity through playing two movement “training games.” One game is similar to Beat Saber, where objects come at the player and need to be hit with certain “movement qualities.” There is a creative aspect to this game, where the player hits stars that are coming at them to create constellations in the sky, training what I call “direct and forceful” movement. The other game is a music- and light-based game that trains “light and indirect” movement.

Once the user finishes the first game, they are transported back to the lobby, where additional quest markers will be encountered and there is additional interaction with Fuller. After finishing the second game, the user will meet Fuller again, who beckons them into the theater for a virtual dance performance.

In future iterations of Master Dancer and the other adventure/activities in the series, there will be more interactivity in the user experience, including the ability for the user to create a “dance sculpture” out of their game play movement, similar to a “TiltBrush” 3D painting. The user will  also get to share their newly learned skills with an online community. In the case of Master Dancer, the user will improvise a dance solo on the virtual stage and join a community of other “master dancers” who have successfully completed the training games. Other adventures in the envisioned series will have activities related to the featured historical figure.

Collaborators:

Creative Lead, miscellaneous asset creation: John Toenjes

Programmers: Luke Puchner-Harding, Arav Chheda, Jerry Xu, M. Landon, Robbie Sieczkowski

Artists: Hajra Lat, Han Ni, architectural components; Rochele Gloor, costume design and animation

Danzatori: David Marchant, Jody Sperling

Concept/Storyboard: John Toenjes, M. Landon

Project Manager: Uliana Ovsiannikova

Sculpture 3D scans graciously provided by the Minneapolis Institute of Art

Dance in the form of live games – Spring semester 2021 ChoreoLab

DANC 456 Choreographic Lab course is going to be approaching social media issues through interactive dance. Using a game structure, we will experiment with how to engage audiences in self-reflection through participating in a game within a performance of contemporary dance. We will most likely be collaborating with a class at Florida International University in Miami, and possibly other remote institutions. This will require employing technologies such as 360-degree video, VR, projections, peer-to-peer Internet collaborations, and a cellphone app. I need someone to help with learning authoring tools for creating 360-degree video and VR scenarios, and in creating app programs on cellphones using a custom utility for audience interaction within the dance. Research into how to link personal VR with public view of the VR-users headset will be needed, as well as into how to live stream this view to remote locations in Miami and Irvine, California. Research might also be required of how to gather tracking information from the headset to be used as data to determine game flow and progression and user choices. At the end of the semester I would like the INFO intern to help write an academic paper about this semester’s experiments for submission to various publications and conferences. Skills and aptitudes desired (but it’s not necessary to know all of) are ability to think creatively, an interest in games, ability to learn high-level authoring tools (such as Max/MSP, Unity, Isadora, Touch Designer), ability to research how to apply technologies to artistic problems, computer programming expertise (any language), editing video in Adobe Premiere and still images in Adobe Photoshop, good writing skills.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Hx0mnUGTazMqb58g0JRXrZvTSVS5qh0h/view?usp=sharing