We caught up with Susanna Murphy and Cristina Spiteri of Bright Side Studios to find out more about bringing dance to virtual reality...
Can you sum up AbstrACTION for us?
You are placed into a CGI environment where you watch an abstracted, motion-capture dance performance.
How did the project come about?
Bright Side Studios and Janis Claxton Dance were commissioned by Creative Scotland to collaborate and come up with something new, exciting and digital.
How was it made?
We worked with Janis and her dancers to choreograph a performance. This was then captured via infrared and depth data technology. The data points were woven into a virtual environment to create this unique immersive VR application.
Were there any challenges along the way?
Working with the depth data was definitely a challenge. The process generated a load of data and there was no straightforward way to crunch it down for use in mobile VR. In the end we had to create our own code to allow us to load and view the data.
What are you hoping to prove and what do you want to learn?
We want to prove that contemporary dance and cutting edge technology can be fused together to create an experience that draws the viewer into a visceral sense of motion, using the VR experience to explore how it may feel to move like the dancers.