MotionDraw: Enhancing Art and Performance Using Kinect
An affordable, accessible framework that empowers artists and performers to control visual effects through intuitive body gestures captured by Microsoft Kinect, transforming movement into projected visual art.
The Vision
Interactive art performances that respond to body movement have long required expensive motion capture equipment and specialized technical knowledge. I wanted to create a system that would be affordable, easy to set up, and intuitive enough for dancers and performers to use without needing a programmer on stage with them. Microsoft Kinect, with its depth-sensing camera, offered the perfect platform.
The Framework
MotionDraw is a framework designed to empower artists creating interactive works with Kinect. It provides an affordable system that performers can easily control and manipulate, allowing non-specialized users to drive visual effects through intuitive gestures. Performers can also interact with captured recordings of their movements, creating layered compositions of live and pre-recorded motion.
The framework emerged from direct collaboration with dancers and performers working in staged performances with advanced lighting and projection capabilities. We designed it around real artistic needs rather than engineering assumptions about what artists might want.
Capabilities
- Gesture-driven visuals: Body movement is tracked by Kinect and mapped to real-time visual effects projected on stage
- Recording and playback: Performers can capture movement sequences and layer them with live performance
- Accessible controls: Designed so performers without technical backgrounds can configure and trigger effects
- Affordable setup: Built around consumer Kinect hardware, dramatically reducing the cost of interactive stage visuals
My Contribution
I was the lead developer on MotionDraw, building the core framework that translates Kinect body tracking data into visual effects. I worked directly with dancers and performers to understand their creative needs and designed the system around those real-world requirements. This was one of my earliest HCI research projects, and it was published as an extended abstract at CHI 2013.
Publication
Gasques Rodrigues, D., Grenader, E., da Silva Nos, F., De Sena Dall'Agnol, M., Hansen, T. E., & Weibel, N. (2013). MotionDraw: A tool for enhancing art and performance using Kinect. CHI Extended Abstracts 2013.
Team
Danilo Gasques, Ph.D., Emily Grenader, Fernando da Silva Nos, Marcel De Sena Dall'Agnol, Troels E. Hansen, Nadir Weibel, Ph.D.