Dancing into the future with augmented reality

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While mixing physical and virtual reality might sound like the stuff of science fiction, the University of New Brunswick’s Daniel Rea hopes to do just that for dancers across Canada.

In his work with Atlantic Ballet Atlantique Canada, funded through the Canada Council for Arts, the associate professor hopes to help dance studios exchange 3D information through an “augmented reality” application called DanceXR.

Rea said that will help small dance companies avoid the high costs of flying in and providing accommodations for a visiting choreographer.

He’s teamed up with Spandrel Interactive, a small software development company housed on UNB’s Fredericton campus, to bring that idea to life.

Rea said the technology is still under development, so what the final product will look like has yet to be determined.

However, he said the research team’s current thinking is that it could function through use of an augmented reality headset – such as Microsoft HoloLens – that projects “hologram” type image onto a clear piece of plastic attached to the headset.

“You put it on, you see the real world, it can display virtual objects inside of it,” Rea said.

Because the information being communicated from dancer to choreographer would be how the body is positioned in space, Rea said, the system would also likely require dancers to wear a light-weight, wireless tracker on certain body parts.

“Things that you could wear without getting in the way of dancing as well, they need a range of motion,” he said.

“They can attach them to a certain part of their body, it’s like an elastic band you can put on their wrist, or torso, we’re looking at using about, anywhere from three to six of them.”

That, in turn, will allow the application to create a “simplified copy of the dancer” to communicate back to the choreographer, he said.

The project is not without hurdles, Rea said, as dance presents some unique challenges for the technology.

“We start with the needs of people, and then work around that,” he said.

For example, Rea said often virtual or mixed reality headsets are not comfortable to wear for long periods of time, especially during an athletic activity like dance.

This principle came into play with the trackers as well, he said, as dancers often make quick and “unusual” movements.

“It’s not as simple as a webcam, we need to get that 3D information … we need to be able to re-create (the image) from all angles ” he said.

“Dancers will get into a lot of poses and postures that most traditional … recognition systems will not catch, because they’re not expecting people to be in those positions.”

Keeping the technology set up as simple as possible for studios is also important to the study, Rea added.

He compared the burgeoning research on augmented reality applications to application development for the iPhone in its infancy.

“When the iPhone first came out, there wasn’t really much on it. Now there are millions of apps on the app store,” he said.

“We think this is a really cool application of the technology. It’s not widespread, we’re trying to tackle it.”

He’s not sure when the application will be finished and in use – but hopes to have dance studios testing a version of it as soon as possible.

“It’s not a tomorrow technology, but it may be closer than we think.”