Virtual Performance Piece Lets You Control A Swarm Of Particles

When you watch those nature documentaries and you see a flock of starlings in flight, performing an aerobic dance against darkening autumn sky, their ranks swelling to 10,000 plus as they move en masse to execute their complex ritual, naturally you think: wouldn’t it be great to bend them to my will? Like a symphony conductor you’d wave your arm left and watch the swarm shift left, then move your arms right and watch them seamlessly veer rightwards. Or simply throw your body around in spasms to watch them flit about haphazardly. Unfortunately, this isn’t possible in the real world, but in the virtual world, anything is possible.

Rodrigo Carvalho has created an interactive virtual performance titled Dancing With Swarming Particles. He uses the standard digital alter ego of the avatar, but with a twist. Instead of the avatar taking the form of a virtual person or creature it becomes a flock of floating particles.

He explains:

The avatar’s body is composed of flocking particles that initially float in the virtual space without any apparent order. It is through the energy of the physical user/performer’s movements that the particles will start to morph into the avatar’s body.

Built in the game development tool Unity 3, the project uses the Kinect and DIY motion tracking software OSCeleton to translate the movements of the performer into the swarming particles. The performer has to first harness the chaotic flock and, as the performance becomes more vigorous, the disparate particles bend to the movements of the user. Eventually, the avatar and performer, in this case, Tamar Regev, become unified.

Performances that pair interactive visuals with physical dancers are becoming ever more popular with examples such as Hellicar & Lewis’ minimalist dance piece Divide by Zero, which used open source software to partner a dancer with a reactive background, and the piece below from TEAMLAB, which uses precise video projection instead of reactive visuals to have performer Taichi Saotome battle his own shadowgraph.

Photo courtesy Rodrigo Carvalho