Special Assignment: Dr. Celine Latulipe!

Title:
Special Assignment: Dr. Celine Latulipe!

Comments:
Zack Henkel
Shena Hoffmann

Reference:
Celine Latulipe and Sybil Huskey. Dance.Draw: Exquisite Interaction. In HCI 2008 Proceedings, pages 47-51, The British Computer Society, 2008. http://www.celinelatulipe.com/Home/Publications_files/Dance_Draw_Paper.pdf


Summary:
The authors work to show their findings with the Dance.Draw system.  It is an inexpensive performance base system in which dancers use air mice in their hands to control graphics projected on a screen while they dance.  The system was developed in C/C++ to be operated on OSX.  The cost of the system is right at $1000 including six air mice and two USB stations.

The paper tracks three performances that took place at three different venues.  The reception was positive from the attendees but mixed from the performers.  The performers were distracted by the visualizations themselves (as they did not necessarily get a chance to watch them prior to the performance) and having the mice in their hands limited their mobility.

Their future work could involve different or just more input devices as well as more attendee feedback.  The feedback could be a part of the visualization.

Discussion:
I have a friend who is a dancer but is not techy by any means.  I think she too would like the idea of adding more of an element to her dance, but would be hesitant about the technology.  She also doesn't like restrictions, so probably wouldn't like holding mice.

I found the performances intriguing even though I was not present at them!  It was refreshing seeing computer science come together with such an art as dancing.  It was funny how the authors seemed to criticize the computer scientist designing the visualization.


Future work or application I could see for this would just be along the lines of the author says in more or different sensors.  It makes me start to think what else could we use things such as air mice for?