MetaSpace II: Object and full-body tracking for interaction and navigation in social VR

MetaSpace II (MS2) is a social Virtual Reality (VR) system where multiple users can not only see and hear but also interact with each other, grasp and manipulate objects, walk around in space, and get tactile feedback. MS2 allows walking in physical space by tracking each user's skeleton in real-time and allows users to feel by employing passive haptics i.e., when users touch or manipulate an object in the virtual world, they simultaneously also touch or manipulate a corresponding object in the physical world. To enable these elements in VR, MS2 creates a correspondence in spatial layout and object placement by building the virtual world on top of a 3D scan of the real world. Through the association between the real and virtual world, users are able to walk freely while wearing a head-mounted device, avoid obstacles like walls and furniture, and interact with people and objects. Most current virtual reality (VR) environments are designed for a single user experience where interactions with virtual objects are mediated by hand-held input devices or hand gestures. Additionally, users are only shown a representation of their hands in VR floating in front of the camera as seen from a first person perspective. We believe, representing each user as a full-body avatar that is controlled by natural movements of the person in the real world (see Figure 1d), can greatly enhance believability and a user's sense immersion in VR.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures. Video: http://living.media.mit.edu/projects/metaspace-ii

Butoh dance in the UK: an ethnographic performance investigation

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the social and cultural significance of butoh dance beyond its original context of postwar Japan.In order to do so, the thesis explores ideas, practices and experiences of butoh dancing among contemporary–Japanese as well as non-Japanese –practitioners: primarily the Oxford-based butoh dance company Café Reason, which constituted the main case study for the research. The ethnographic particularities of butoh, as defined by its practitioners, provided the core of the investigation.That is, a common notion among teachers and students of this dance form is that butoh has no conclusive form or style.They also say that butoh is defined by its very defying of definitions.Thus, the central question that runs through the thesis is: ‘How does butoh, a dance that resists codification and classification, continue to be practised and reinvented?’ The central hypothesis of the thesis is that the core of butoh lies in its perceptual, rather than its formal, constitution and articulation.In order to test this hypothesis I engaged an unorthodox methodology that, by explicitly mobilizing sensory engagement in the processes of training and performing butoh, brought my own experience to the centre-stage of the analysis.In turn, the methodological focus on the senses unveiled the sophisticated aesthetic dimensions of butoh dancing, especially its reliance on tactile-kinesthetic perception. Based on these methodological premises, a review of butoh training and performances allowed an approach to the semantic and perceptual ‘indeterminacy’ of the butoh body. The latter is typically associated with unintelligible levels of experience: in the form of either intense, and often ‘anti-social,’ emotional states, or augmented, near-religious, states of awareness. These findings led me to identify ‘emotion’ and ‘otherness’ as the core experiential dimensions of butoh dancing, which, in turn, explains its continuity and significance as an art form. Ultimately, butoh’s synthesis of ‘art’ and ‘spirituality,’ or of ‘dance’ and ‘therapy,’ allows the analysis to situate this cultural phenomenon in a continuum between ritual and aesthetic performance, with different butoh dancers placing themselves at different positions within this spectrum

Environments of Intelligence

What is the role of the environment, and of the information it provides, in cognition? More specifically, may there be a role for certain artefacts to play in this context? These are questions that motivate "4E" theories of cognition (as being embodied, embedded, extended, enactive). In his take on that family of views, Hajo Greif first defends and refines a concept of information as primarily natural, environmentally embedded in character, which had been eclipsed by information-processing views of cognition. He continues with an inquiry into the cognitive bearing of some artefacts that are sometimes referred to as 'intelligent environments'. Without necessarily having much to do with Artificial Intelligence, such artefacts may ultimately modify our informational environments. With respect to human cognition, the most notable effect of digital computers is not that they might be able, or become able, to think but that they alter the way we perceive, think and act. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781315401867, has been made available under a Creative Commons CC-BY licenc