Odyssey is proud to provide a home to Senses Places – a dance based mixed reality project by Isabel Valverde and collaborators. The project runs a mixed reality participatory environment on the Odyssey Simulator in Second Life and this week presented performances and demonstrations at the 2016 Open Sim Community Conference.

Here are some images from one of the performances at the conference.Dancers and other participants in RL (real life) link to their avatars via a webcam interface. The webcam picks up mocap points on the dancer’s body and translates the movement (via the internet) to the dancer’s avatar in world.

ABOUT SENSES PLACES from sensesplaces.org

Senses Places is a dance-technology collaborative project creating a playful mixed reality performance environment for audience participation. Generating whole body multimodal interfacings keen to a somatic cross-cultural approach, the project stresses an integration of simultaneous local and remote connections, where participants and environments meet towards a kinesthetic/synesthetic engagement.

Tuning the audience participants into several whole body modes of physical-virtual body-body and body-environment interactions, within a physical and virtual environment (Second Life©), Senses Places re-purposes recent Web 2.0 enabled game devices with a synergetic/semantic approach to interface design. The interfaces include, video and avatar mediations via Webcam, Wiimote©, and Kinect©, plus a biometric device.

Through an inclusive process engaging kinesthetic empathy, Senses Places deepens contemporary dance practices, such as, Contact Improvisation and Butoh, interweaving Eastern-Western somatic based practices, like, Tai Chi, Yôga, Body-Mind Centering, Release, and Alexander Techniques. The improvisation evolves in a sharing of corporealized places, times, and energies, encouraging a fuller experience of the moment.

Emerging embodiments, realities, and cultures are generated by the multi-participant playful involvement as the participants follow, act upon, and respond to each others’ physical bodies, video mediations, avatar moves, and/or environmental changes. Climate related body-environment activity is affected through wireless communication, linking biometric inputs and environmental device actuators, such as, temperature-light/color, breathing-smoke/wind modulations.

Senses Places wishes to contribute to enlarge the range and interconnectedness of sensory-perceptions within the already complex practice of group improvisation, proposing a constructive and transformative means of inter-subjective and collective socialization, reversing the dead end substitution, gender and movement cultural stereotypification, and instrumentalization of bodies by avatars in social networks, such as Second Life.