Transitioning Between Audience and Performer: Co-Designing Interactive Music Performances with Children

Live interactions have the potential to meaningfully engage audiences during musical performances, and modern technologies promise unique ways to facilitate these interactions. This work presents findings from three co-design sessions with children that investigated how audiences might want to interact with live music performances, including design considerations and opportunities. Findings from these sessions also formed a Spectrum of Audience Interactivity in live musical performances, outlining ways to encourage interactivity in music performances from the child perspective

3D (embodied) projection mapping and sensing bodies : a study in interactive dance performance

This dissertation identifies the synergies between physical and virtual environments when designing for immersive experiences in interactive dance performances. The integration of virtual information in physical space is transforming our interactions and experiences with the world. By using the body and creative expression as the interface between real and virtual worlds, dance performance creates a privileged framework to research and design interactive mixed reality environments and immersive augmented architectures. The research is primarily situated in the fields of visual art and interaction design. It combines performance with transdisciplinary fields and intertwines practice with theory. The theoretical and conceptual implications involved in designing and experiencing immersive hybrid environments are analyzed using the reality–virtuality continuum. These theories helped frame the ways augmented reality architectures are achieved through the integration of dance performance with digital software and reception displays. They also helped identify the main artistic affordances and restrictions in the design of augmented reality and augmented virtuality environments for live performance. These pervasive media architectures were materialized in three field experiments, the live dance performances. Each performance was created in three different stages of conception, design and production. The first stage was to “digitize” the performer’s movement and brain activity to the virtual environment and our system. This was accomplished through the use of depth sensor cameras, 3D motion capture, and brain computer interfaces. The second stage was the creation of the computational architecture and software that aggregates the connections and mapping between the physical body and the spatial dynamics of the virtual environment. This process created real-time interactions between the performer’s behavior and motion and the real-time generative computer 3D graphics. Finally, the third stage consisted of the output modality: 3D projector based augmentation techniques were adopted in order to overlay the virtual environment onto physical space. This thesis proposes and lays out theoretical, technical, and artistic frameworks between 3D digital environments and moving bodies in dance performance. By sensing the body and the brain with the 3D virtual environments, new layers of augmentation and interactions are established, and ultimately this generates mixed reality environments for embodied improvisational self-expression.Radio-Television-Fil

Designing for Ballet Classes: Identifying and Mitigating Communication Challenges Between Dancers and Teachers

Dancer-teacher communication in a ballet class can be challenging: ballet is one of the most complex forms of movements, and learning happens through multi-faceted interactions with studio tools (mirror, barre, and floor) and the teacher. We conducted an interview-based qualitative study with seven ballet teachers and six dancers followed by an open-coded analysis to explore the communication challenges that arise while teaching and learning in the ballet studio. We identified key communication issues, including adapting to multi-level dancer expertise, transmitting and realigning development goals, providing personalized corrections and feedback, maintaining the state of flow, and communicating how to properly use tools in the environment. We discuss design implications for crafting technological interventions aimed at mitigating these communication challenges

'Making up' the middle-class child: families, activities and class dispositions

In this paper we draw on data collected from a recent qualitative project to highlight the enthusiasm of middle class parents for enrolling their under-5s in ‘enrichment’ activities (extra-curricular creative and sporting classes). We seek to identify the part activities play in parental strategies for class reproduction. We first consider the broader issue of children and consumption, drawing out the way in which consumption and leisure activities are highly classed, and focusing on notions of taste and distinction. Then using examples from the data, we emphasise the sense of urgency and responsibility parents felt concerning their child’s development and the classed and gendered involvement of parents. We conclude that enrichment activities are one response to the anxiety and sense of responsibility experienced by middle class parents as they attempt to ‘make up’ a middle class child in a social context where reproduction appears uncertain

A Spectrum of Audience Interactivity for entertainment domains

The concept of audience interactivity has been rediscovered across many domains of storytelling and entertainment—e.g. digital games, in-person role-playing, film, theater performance, music, and theme parks—that enrich the form with new idioms, language, and practices. In this paper, we introduce a Spectrum of Audience Interactivity that establishes a common vocabulary for the design space across entertainment domains. Our spectrum expands on an early vocabulary conceptualized through co-design sessions for interactive musical performances. We conduct a cross-disciplinary literature review to evaluate and iterate upon this vocabulary, using our findings to develop our validated spectrum

Design Issues of Reserved Delivery Subnetworks

In this proposal, we introduce the reserved delivery subnetwork (RDS), a mechanism that can al-low information service providers to deliver more consistent service to their customers without perflow resource reservation. In addition to service performance improvements, reserved delivery sub-networks can also provide protection against network resource attacks. Many applications such asweb content delivery services and virtual private networks can benefit from reserved delivery sub-networks. We address a number of issues with the deployment of RDSs. First, we formulate theconfiguration problem of an RDS as a minimum concave cost network flow problem, where the perunit flow cost decreases as the current flow increases. An approximation heuristic is presented andstudied to solve this configuration problem. Second, we extend our study to the configuration prob-lem of RDSs with multiple sources. We also investigate the configuration problem for subnetworksthat allow load redistribution and load balancing among the sources. In addition, we plan to studyhow to use RDS proxies to regulate the flow of traffic to end users, so as to minimize network delay