Celeritas — A Wearable Sensor System for Interactive Digital Dance Theatre

Abstract

Celeritas is an artistic/scientific collaboration between the Tyndall National Institute (Cork), the Interaction Design Centre in Limerick, Cindy Cummings (Dance Artist, Cork) and Todd Winkler (Composer and Digital Artist, Brown University, USA). Research Teams at the Tyndall Institute are developing wireless sensor network nodes, also known as motes, and associated miniaturized sensors. Motes can be applied in many different domains, ranging from medical and environmental monitoring to everyday applications in ubiquitous computing. This project aims to apply Tyndall’s sensor system to create a wireless dance costume for audio/visual performance using inertial sensor monitoring technology.

Dancers could be regarded as experts on human movement, producing accurate and expressive actions that provide a rich testing ground for human-computer interaction. The collaboration will push the boundaries of both artistic practice and wearable mote technology, as we will adapt and apply the Tyndall mote platform in a prototype body suit embedded with sensors. Software developed by the Interaction Design Centre and Todd Winkler will then convert the movement information detected by the sensors into computer generated sounds and processed video images. This mapping allows the dancer (Cummings) to fuse aspects of the physical body with the extended possibilities of the electronic body.

This paper presents the hardware platform that has been developed for the Celeritas project. The system is based around the Tyndall 25mm Wireless Inertial Measurement Unit (WIMU) node. The WIMU system is designed for integration into a body suit, which is to be worn by the dancer, whose movements are extracted from the wearable network of sensors and processed by a high-level software system that connects to the dancer wirelessly.