Joining the dots

The basement of Cambridge’s CB2 Café is inhabited by a visually appealing and enjoyably interactive Future Physical commission called dotdotdot . The brainchild of Igloo – aka Bruno Martelli and Ruth Gibson – dotdotdot physically resides on two laptops hooked up to plasma screens.

dotdotdot’s accessibility belies its underlying complexity. At its heart is movement data, motion-captured from six dancers. Launch the program – having chosen one of six dancing forms – and you are presented with a dancing figure with which you can interact. Visually, the figures come in a variety of forms: from collections of dots which mirror the raw motion-capture data, via a figure that looks like it was constructed from pipecleaners to a figure constructed from typography. Instantly, you grasp the possibilities offered by motion-capture.

Each dancing figure can be rotated and repositioned using the mouse (they all respond to mouse input in subtly different ways), panned and zoomed in and out. Extra visual effects can be applied to many of them, such as the addition of trails. The overall effect is fascinating and certainly leads to musings about the body and technology: however inorganic the figures look, they move in a human manner. The ability to rotate can create interesting visual effects – it is possible, with some of the dancing figures, to create the illusion that you are looking up at them from underneath the dancefloor, for example.

Gibson’s choreography for the motion-captured dancers took in several styles of dance, including contact improvisation: Gibson explains that one dancer wore sensors while their contact improve partner did not – creating the effect of an invisible presence. Martelli, meanwhile explains the complexity of the installation: five software packages were used to get from mocap data to end-product – namely Hypervision, Filmbox, Maya, Director and Shockwave. Martelli is working to put dotdotdot on the web – he says that thanks to Shockwave’s advanced compression, even a five-minute looping dance sequence equates to a 600Kb download.

The physical and the virtual meet most agreeably in dotdotdot – watch the Future Physical website, as the installation will soon take up residence there.