Magic Dance Mirror

Date
Category
Motion
Tags
Augmented Reality, Dance, Interactive, Kinetc, Motion Capture, Music, Tracking
About This Project

Visualizing The Magic for Magic Dance Mirror

There’s universal appeal to seeing a lifesize projection of one’s self, activating a beautiful array of graphic visualizations pulsing away to music on a 10 ft screen across the room. This is The Magic Dance Mirror.

 

When Magic Dance Mirror founder Kyle Ruddick asked Jekyll Works to help with research and development and design efforts we enthusiastically jumped at the opportunity. Our design responsibilities fell into two categories:  Graphic assets to be used in the current MDM build, and visualizations of potential ideas to share with developers. First we created a library of animated sprites to be used as particles emitted from the user’s body. These helped provide visual complexity and variation to the user’s movements while giving a visual identifier to ambient music playing near by. Secondly we used stock dance footage and techniques based on the ones used by developers to create short animated sequences visualizing various effects. These layered animations were then refined and shared to create a bridge between design and code. The Magic Dance Mirror research and development tasks focused on using known technologies in ways to help expand the capabilities of MDM in future builds. We used the Kinect sensor and motion capture technology to record full body joint data to be used in 3d applications. This allowed us to place virtual props on a dancer while tracking the location in space for realistic movement. Jekyll Works also helped work on the visual implementation of face tracking technology and what it would look like to replace a user’s face with graphical masks in real-time.

 

Music:
1 – Things To Say by Uncle Milk

2 – Hola Hola Bossa Nova by Juanitos

3 – Naked Street by Cosmic Analog Ensemble