The Irish MIDAS collective has brought together programmers, designers, and composers working to fuse traditional and new techniques. Their premiere project is entitled “MIDASpaces,” a kind of dynamic performance space built on projection mapping and responsive interaction. As they describe it:
MIDASpaces: An interactive projection mapped space designed for the Creative Arts. Using the Latest tracking technology, the space learns, adapts and reacts, allowing the performer to create new improvised performances.
The promo video is shot in Dublin’s lovely performance space The Helix, working with a PS3 Eye camera modded for infrared light and openFrameworks for tracking. (There’s a bit of Kinect, too, they say.) Three projectors do all the work – proof that you can do quite a lot just by adding a projector or two, before you go crazy with a flock of projectors.
There are definitely some familiar tropes here, though I think that’s honestly the best place to start with a new project, and I’m eager to see where else this goes. Dancer Tom O’Donnell has been working on improvisatory dance movement, and it’s worth saying that this sort of medium can benefit from pushing choreography and music and visual content, not only the technological aspect itself.
Great work, folks; I’d love to get back to the brain trust that seems to flourish in Dublin soon!
Keep the projects coming. Lastly, a couple of videos of the work in-progress, testing both Kinect and PS3 cam:
Other ingredients: Quartz Composer, and one tool I hadn’t seen before:
tryplex, a set of macros for Kinect. Let’s put that in another post, actually.