Dance!

2017.12 | Collaborate with Yifan Liu

Kinect | Kinectron | P5.js

Dance! is a Kinect project that invite people to dance via body interacting with screen and music.

Concept

The initial idea of this project is inspired by one of my club experience. I found that people just start dancing once there are right music and right atmosphere, so that occurs to me that what if I give the right music and give the cool visual effects on the screen, sort of create an atmosphere, would people dance? Or in other words, how can we invite people to dance involuntarily through a series of interactions between people and screen.

Problem

When Yifan and I started designing the whole process of interaction, we found that how to make people dance is a big issue, people just tend to stay calm listening the music and watch the visual effects, moving their head a little is the most. They feel interesting but don't want to dance up. There must have something on the screen could guide people to dance.

Solution

After user test, we decided make the interaction more like a game. We use Kinect to track people's body, and there are some rectangles falling down to certain height that when people move their body to touch rectangles, rectangles are going to explode. People have to move their hands to make the rectangle explode, and if we set up the height of the rectangles high enough, people have to jump to touch them and they are more prone to jump with music beats, and then dance.

Further Problems

Although we manage to show this piece on the winter show, there are still some problems that we should polish afterwards.

• People's height is different, how could we set up a height of the falling rectangles for everyone?

• Visual part is kinda simple, if people can trigger some special event via different moves?

• Kinect working on a mac using P5.js is a little slow, maybe we should move the project to windows platform.

Code here

Exhibited in ITP Winter Show 2017.