Digital World and Image studio blog

Digital Historical Reenactments

Premise:
Student-created theatrical settings are constructed in a digital environment, and the students control puppets to create reenactments of notable historical events.

Details:
We will use Unity3D to make an engine for digital theatrical stage creation. This engine will have the capability to add a limited number of actors, an arbitrary number of image plane backdrops, and additional prop items. These items may be represented as image planes, or possibly created in a 3D environment. The actors will be created from additional image planes, and controlled using either the Microsoft Kinect or DWIG’s Android puppet controllers. Prop items may also be linked to controllers and moved throughout the scene. Scene changes will be programmed in, and will occur by sliding one scene’s backdrop offstage while sliding another in.

Assignment For Students:
1. Go out into the world and gather photographs at a historical location. Frame these photographs as if they were backdrops or scenery items on a stage.
2. Using the photographs, create a number of scenes in our digital stage around this re-enactment.
3. Design digital actors using photographs as well.
4. Create a story or historical re-enactment around these designed scenes/actors.
5. Perform it live in front of your classmates?

DWIG’s Role:
We must create the engine for the construction of these settings. The current “puppet theater” interface already allows for puppet control using an Android phone. We would need to create ways for students to bring in an image file into a Unity application and apply it as a texture to a plane or other primitive 3D object. Additional tools for image positioning, resizing, and cropping may also be useful in this endeavor. We would also need to create an interface for constructing the puppets. If we went the KInect route, we would also have to create a way for linking motion as detected by Kinect into puppet movement. Finally, we would need to devise a means for arranging these backdrops on a stage. We could do this by having fixed backdrop positions, or by allowing the students to move them through the scene on their own. Also, a means for automatically saving and retrieving these custom scenes would be needed so that the students could work on them over time and keep them for future use. Finally, we would need to spend time instructing and helping the students in the use of this software, an inevitable task no matter what we go with.

Division of Work:

Nick: Unity Programming
Andy: More Programming?
Friedrich: Additional Programming?
Christine: UI Design
Ashton: UI Design
Xiao: UI Design
Some Combination of Us: Student Instruction

Full PDF

This is a proposal built off the initial “Digital Mirror Parade” where kids and students would go on a historical walk, compile a 3D map of this walk, and re-project it onto the actual space.

After further discussion, it looks like we are going to focus instead on a single building or place. Here is a revised version of the idea to attempt to provide a feasible concept. This new concept consists of three parts:

A)      MAPPING                               Kids map an area using RGBD6D SLAM

B)       MANIPULATION   Let kids manipulate 3D content

C)       INTERACTION/DISPLAY        Interact via Re-project onto actual space

The technical part of this challenge is: create something that allows us to scan/ register an existing space. This virtual form of the space, then, is a sort of collection space where the students can assemble, activate, perform … things related to the site or to historical elements of the civil right movement.
We cannot provide for all kinds of data collections – so part of the design challenge is to limit the students’ access in a reasonable but still engaging way.
With this challenge we move ever closer to the final project to be implemented, so keep the feasibility of your idea in mind. In fact, include a breakdown of who does what from the group in your presentation.

In this piece, gestural movements of dance are preserved but recoded as an interconnected set of paisley shapes. The artist’s dance would be recorded and the movements paired with specific points on the vector, multiplied and translated in space to disguise the dancing human female form objectionable in the context where it is to be displayed. Movements required to interact with the piece constitute dance, and the process of exploring the responsive feedback transforms onlookers into dancers. This interaction removes them from their immediate environment and recasts them as unwitting subverters.

See below the scribbled notes taken during the session 10/5