MAVi
Movement Aesthetic Visualisation Tool.
Movement Aesthetic Visualisation Tool (MAVi) is a tool designed and developed to explore the possibilities of use of movement data for video making and live performance. It was developed during an internship at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology of Simon Fraser University Surrey in Canada between May and June 2015. The tool was presented as a work-in-progress on International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in Hong Kong in May 2016. Also, a video piece Internal developed using this tool was presented in the same conference as an artist talk.
MAVi takes as input the body points, and creates triangulations between neighbour points. It allows to apply textures (colours, pictures and videos) to the created triangles and modify their positions in three-dimensional space. It can be used not just for movement data visualisation, but also for real-time manipulation and recording. Every frame can be saved and used for the creation of animated sequences.
The possibility of work with real-time Kinect data makes it suitable not just for video dance but also live performance and artistic installations.
Motivation
MAVi is a software tool that allows three-dimensional data visualisation, animation and creative interpretation. We developed it to explore the artistic potential of the motion capture data. It allows applying effects like automatic camera movements, light settings manipulation, data noise and colour, photo and video texturization. Our tool works with technologies like optical motion capture systems and real-time movement sensor Kinect to generate video shots that can be further combined to create video dance pieces.
Implementation
Version 1.0 of the tool implements the following modules:
- Input data: allows defining the type of data to work with. They can be BVH formatted skeleton joints data, CSV files with markers position provided by Vicon motion capture system or Kinect user map or skeleton points provided by SimpleOpenNI library.
- Triangles: makes possible to manipulate properties like transparency or texture (colour scale, pictures or video) of every single triangle. It allows to upload videos or pictures for texture generation and controls the number of the visible triangles from previous frames in the scene.
- Background: manipulates the parameters related to the background.
- Auto rotation: controls automatic camera movements.
- Lights setting: manages the light setting of the scene.
- Noise: adds noise to the data points (random noise or Perlin noise).
- Recording: allows frame recording for the further video creation.
Examples of use
The videos of some MAVi functionalities can be consulted here: