2023, Live Motion Capture Performance
Collaborative project by Eva Kramer, Alexah Fort, Rain Sidwell, and Rori Johnson
The Game of the Seasons was a live “Game Show” motion capture experience that was presented at the 2023 Winter Open Studios at the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts in Lincoln, NE. Our team of four utilized Unreal Engine, OptiTrack, and Motive to create a virtual world and avatars that would be controlled by myself and my collaborators Rain Sidwell and Alexah Fort during the live performance using motion capture technology.
The concept of the game was a riff on games like “Simon Says”. The audience was divided into two halves as either the “Hot” team or the “Cold” team. Myself and Alexah Fort were costumed in motion capture suits to perform as the “Cold” and “Hot” avatars respectively. We were blindfolded and verbally directed by the live audience to copy a randomized pose of our assigned avatars on screen. Rain Sidwell played the Game Host (also in a motion capture suit) and would decide which team copied the pose the best after which Rori Johnson would assign the points at her station at the computer. I was in charge of the programming of this game within Unreal Engine. I worked with Unreal Blueprints to create the mechanism that allowed the avatars to follow our live movements for some of the time and freeze on a randomized, pre-captured pose for the challenge parts of the game. I also programmed keys to switch between various virtual camera angles so that Rori Johnson could control the view of the performance in real time. This project allowed us to explore how motion capture can be used to bring people together through play and audience interaction.
