The Bathysphere: Motion Capture as Art
Principal Investigator
Francesca Talenti, UNC Communication Studies
Greg Welch, Research Associate Professor, Computer Science, UNC
Contributors
Herman Towles, Senior Research Associate
John Thomas, Research Associate/AEL Manager
Mingsong Dou, UNC computer science graduate student
Yi-Hung Jen, UNC computer science undergraduate student
Caitlyn Losee, Undergraduate student in Computer Science
Zhen Shao, UNC computer science graduate student
Ying Shi, UNC computer science graduate student
Chiung-Yi Tseng, UNC computer science graduate student
Michael Xu, UNC computer science undergraduate student
Yu Zheng, UNC computer science graduate student
Project Description
Talenti and Welch are collaborating on a piece titled The Bathysphere, which will run in Gerrard Hall during the CHAT festival, February 16-20.
What is The Bathysphere? It is an underwater opera and an interactive game—a musical narrative in which the audience triggers events.
Imagine: You enter Gerrard Hall. Projected on the walls, ceiling and floor, you see an underwater world floating by and hear its gentle sounds. You also see a few real objects around you: Pick up a beach ball, and toss it. An octopus appears! You notice that as you move your beach ball, the octopus moves correspondingly, projected on the walls, floor and ceiling.
It is as if you are inside an aquarium. The octopus also has a voice and sings or speaks, depending on the scene and situation. For example, imagine that another person in Gerrard picks up a fishing rod. It is re-projected as a shark, the octopus’s enemy! The octopus’s voice reacts accordingly.
Other scenes and characters will occur, but the main character is the octopus, whose intelligence and real-world capacity to camouflage and squirt ink make for a compelling character. To complete this character and his world, Talenti and Welch will work with a sound designer and composer to create an original musical score.
Motion capture records movement and translates it to a digital model, usually a 3-D animated model. In this project, the researchers aim to translate movement generated by an object (the beach ball, for instance), rather than a human in a motion capture suit as is typical. Through the captured data, they seek to generate an entirely non-human character (the octopus). Audience members will themselves have an opportunity to participate through manipulating the objects fitted with the motion capture system.
This project is a chance to use a motion capture system purely for artistic and scholarly computer science exploration. The researchers have recruited five graduate students and two undergraduate students in computer science to contribute to the project.
While The Bathysphere has undoubtedly whimsical elements, it has severe technological requirements: One team will simulate water in its various forms; another will build software to drive particle and physics; and a third will implement infrastructure to drive a dozen projectors for the space.
