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

Sensing and mapping for interactive performance

This paper describes a trans-domain mapping (TDM) framework for translating meaningful activities from one creative domain onto another. The multi-disciplinary framework is designed to facilitate an intuitive and non-intrusive interactive multimedia performance interface that offers the users or performers real-time control of multimedia events using their physical movements. It is intended to be a highly dynamic real-time performance tool, sensing and tracking activities and changes, in order to provide interactive multimedia performances. From a straightforward definition of the TDM framework, this paper reports several implementations and multi-disciplinary collaborative projects using the proposed framework, including a motion and colour-sensitive system, a sensor-based system for triggering musical events, and a distributed multimedia server for audio mapping of a real-time face tracker, and discusses different aspects of mapping strategies in their context. Plausible future directions, developments and exploration with the proposed framework, including stage augmenta tion, virtual and augmented reality, which involve sensing and mapping of physical and non-physical changes onto multimedia control events, are discussed

Custom-designed motion-based games for older adults: a review of literature in human-computer interaction

Many older adults, particularly persons living in senior residences and care homes, lead sedentary lifestyles, which reduces their life expectancy. Motion-based video games encourage physical activity and might be an opportunity for these adults to remain active and engaged; however, research efforts in the field have frequently focused on younger audiences and little is known about the requirements and benefits of motion-based games for elderly players. In this paper, we present an overview of motion-based video games and other interactive technologies for older adults. First, we summarize existing approaches towards the definition of motion-based video games – often referred to as exergames – and suggest a categorization of motion-based applications into active video games, exergames, and augmented sports. Second, we use this scheme to classify case studies addressing design efforts particularly directed towards older adults. Third, we analyze these case studies with a focus on potential target audiences, benefits, challenges in their deployment, and future design opportunities to investigate whether motion-based video games can be applied to encourage physical activity among older adults. In this context, special attention is paid to evaluation routines and their implications regarding the deployment of such games in the daily lives of older adults. The results show that many case studies examine isolated aspects of motion-based game design for older adults, and despite the broad range of issues in motion-based interaction for older adults covered by the sum of all research projects, there appears to be a disconnect between laboratory-based research and the deployment of motion-based video games in the daily lives of senior citizens. Our literature review suggests that despite research results suggesting various benefits of motion-based play for older adults, most work in the field of game design for senior citizens has focused on the implementation of accessible user interfaces, and that little is known about the long-term deployment of video games for this audience, which is a crucial step if these games are to be implemented in activity programs of senior residences, care homes, or in therapy

The theatre and its screen double

This essay offers a close exploration of the live filming and sound production in the schaubühne berlin staging of strindberg's Fräulein Julie (directed by Katie Mitchell, shown on tour at the barbican, london, in 2012). It provides a series of theoretical and critical angles from which to discuss contemporary intermedia performance and audiovisual scenography. After a brief evocation of Artaud's writings in "theatre and cruelty" and on raw cinema, the essay builds on a historical understanding of Western theatre's evolving and hardly settled relationship to cinematography and moving-image technologies, as well as the "choreographic unconscious," as examined in contemporary dance and technology, before delving into an analysis of Mitchell's dramaturgy of real-time film construction and her use of the "camera-actor." A particular emphasis is placed on the question whether the live mediatization of realist drama, under Mitchell's direction, deliberately weakens the theatricality of the physical body and spoken language while proffering an extenuated, if uncritical/unpolitical modulation of digital prosthetics in a superbly crafted, seamless intermedial performance

Exploring digital encounters in the city

In this paper we explore the types of encounters that technology enables. We consider the differences between digital and non-digital encounters, and investigate how technology can be appropriated for shared interactions that support conscious (or unconscious) social encounters. Finally, we describe two prototypes that generate different types of digital encounters in a city context, and we discuss our initial results