This project was inspired by The Improvisation Technologies by William Forsythe and the Put That There project by the MIT Media Lab. I wanted to update the technologies behind both of these projects and apply them in a performance context.
William Forsythe (1955-) is a choreographer best known for his work in ballet. He created a set of videos demonstrating the underlying geometry of humans in motion. His videos were created on film and hand rotoscoped.
In 1979 the MIT Media Lab Speech Interface group created a project called Put That There. The project combined a laser pointer device with a voice recognition system. This was one of the earliest experiments in spacial human computer interaction using voice recognition.
Using a Microsoft Kinect depth sensor, Chrome voice recognition and a custom Processing app, I created this interface. Each joint on a single person is tracked. As demonstrated in the video, the user vocally asks the computer to overlay a line on the body and the computer complies.