Sally Jane Norman, Culture Lab, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK.

Alan F. Blackwell, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. J J Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0FD, UK.

Lorraine Warren, School of Management, University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK.

Kirk Woolford, Dept of Media and Film, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, BN1 9RG, UK.

Additional participants: Newcastle: Dave Green, Catriona MacInnes, Jamie Thompson, Nick Williams;  Cambridge: Daniel Bernhardt, Ian Davies, Chris Nash, Peter Robinson; Sussex: Andrew Duff; Lincoln: Fizza Alamdar, Ted Fuller.

This five-month practice-led scoping project explored motion capture development perspectives from artistic, technological and business innovation standpoints. Breadth and diversity of the motion capture user base make it a rich locus for interdisciplinary collaboration and novel work models, thus a source of useful insights into creative knowledge transfer processes. We convened an interdisciplinary community from the arts, sciences and business studies, experienced in practice-driven collaborative research, and focused our effort on prototyping workshops in Newcastle and Cambridge, with an interim work session to optimize collaboration and a final creative industries seminar in Cambridge to promote debate with a wide stakeholder community.

Our work drew on several distinct strands of motion capture research led by the project partners: these investigations of gesture and embodied interaction represent complementary approaches and a valuable starting point for seeding practice-led research collaborations. An iterative work model was implemented whereby prototyping experiments were subject to discussion sessions to identify economic implications associated with emerging communities of practice. These sessions were steered by Lorraine Warren, joined for the second workshop by Ted Fuller. Central to the project were PhD students in performing arts, computing, and business studies, working alongside research assistants specialized in motion capture and digital sound and imaging.

Concrete results were achieved in terms of computing breakthroughs, notably by making motion capture data streams interoperable with other programs: Java code was authored to connect Vicon streams to Max MSP, and patches, samples and interfaces were devised to open this hybrid platform up to various kinds of gestural control. By subjecting the system to playful experimentation that went way beyond conventional benchmarking, it was possible to generate robust, reproducibly responsive, multimodal interactions, allowing gestural control of visual and sonic outputs. Obvious potential marketable products include interfaces for wii-type game environments, valuable in therapeutic, education and leisure applications. In its present form, the software is a multi-purpose toolkit offering good scope for students exploring interactive systems.

At a more general level, by framing ongoing practical experimentation in broader reflection on innovative collaborative work, we became aware of the spectrum of values that can emerge within motivated, interdisciplinary developer teams. In a diverse stakeholder community like ours, constant renewal of dialogue is a socially vital counterpart to the iterative prototyping principle adopted in technical design. Theoretical findings bore on the differentiation of values as a function of the multiple time windows that are simultaneously at work in complex processes, and as a function of the level of resolution applied in a given analysis.

This scoping exercise yielded a wealth of technical and conceptual material. We plan to consolidate the software toolkit by using the associated libraries to build an original, customizable interactive gestural control system, working with students and graduates, and partners from the performing arts. Dialogue initiated with industrial and institutional partners will be upheld, to optimize visibility and monitor development opportunities. Finally, we shall continue to seek out novel, salient features of our research processes, to see how these might be accommodated by or adapted to business development tuned to innovative knowledge transfer.

http://culturelab.ncl.ac.uk/creator