Motion Capture Technology for Enhancing Live Dance Performances

Sofiia Khutorna, Derek Jacoby, Anthony Estey, Yvonne Coady

Abstract: Dancing with Avatars: Can Shadows Keep Pace? Commodity motion capture (mo-cap) equipment and Virtual Reality (VR) can now be combined to create highly synchronized movements between physical and digital worlds. Precise shadowing, however, requires some innovative techniques to accurately capture streaming movement data for virtual dancers. In our research, we stream body movement data from a Rokoko Smartsuit Pro II to a virtual character in Unreal Engine and project the character behind the dancer to assess how close to real-time the shadowing can be. Our results show how to obtain the most precise mo-cap data from the suit sensors and use it to enhance a dance performance in various ways. In this paper, we will explain how we overcame the challenges associated with a setup for live streaming and demonstrate our findings.