As the relationship of humans to their environments is radically reshaped through expanding network infrastructure, miniaturized electronics and proliferating digital information, the push for a greater understanding of the human form and its movement through space will be needed. The projects in Bits & Bodies series look into methods and tools for digitally and physically duplicating the human form and its movements through "pixel-mappping."
Digital Avatar (Dancing Atoms)
Roberto’s 3D scan and motion capture are utilized by designers and researchers to interpolate the data and create visualization modes, through software, which are used to study and quantify critical body features, and examine the body in ways never before possible.
Flyfire Project
Flyfire, a project initiated by the SENSEable City Laboratory in collaboration with ARES Lab (Aerospace Robotics and Embedded Systems Laboratory) aims to transform any ordinary space into a highly immersive and interactive display environment.
Custom for TED2011, Dancing Atoms visualizes the capability of Flyfire’s core attributes of beauty, strength, transformation and fluidity with a 3D avatar and captured motion of Italy’s étoile ballet dancer, Roberto Bolle converted to pixels.
Hosted by digital artist Aaron Koblin, Floating Pixels was a 1-day workshop where students and researchers from MIT explored new developments and forms of detached media by building their own low-tech 3D light scanners and pixelating their faces with Processing.
Using multiple Microsoft Kinects, Pixel Vision captures real-time range image information of the entire human form and movement to be digitally reconstructed as point clouds. The digital points contain x,y,z coordinate data and become potential location maps for physical free-form displays like Flyfire.
