The recent practical experiments were motivated by the desire to create a transformational experience for a performer (or performers) and their audience using multi-modal technology (projection, live responsive computer generated characters and Kinect body sensing).
A research question might be “Can a projected responsive avatar produce a sense of the uncanny in a performer and/or an audience?”
Classic research requires that this hypothesis be tested and validated, typically through user testing, questions and analysis. Rather than simply testing a hypothesis my personal preference is to discover how other performers react to the system, how it might be further developed and whether it has any value. To this end it is planned that a number of workshops will be held in approximately 8-10 weeks time, after a series of questions and planned scenarios have been developed – a workshop structure.
Meanwhile I do feel that this approach has a limited trajectory, it is not difficult to envisage how a more stable and believable system might be developed, one can imagine scenarios and short scenes of how it might be used. If this were an arts project with an intended public audience then I would be focussing on improving the quality and interactive responses of the system, developing scripts and and developing believable and engaging content.
However this is research, and I am feeling unsure exactly of how to balance theory and practice. Further, I am not entirely clear as to what is an appropriate research methodology given that my work and approach sits somewhere uncomfortably between Art Practice and Computer Science.
My feeling is that the Unity/Kinect model has reached an end and that other techniques need to be explored. If this were purely an arts practice led PhD then I believe that this would be a valid and acceptable mode of enquiry, that new techniques need to be tried without resorting to establishing a hypothesis and then testing it to determine its validity. I refer back now to my research proposal where I examined various research methods especially the Performative Research Manifesto envisaged by Brad Haseman.
Taking its name from J.L. Austin’s speech act theory, performative research stands as an alternative to the qualitative and quantitative paradigms by insisting on different approaches to designing, conducting and reporting research. The paper concludes by observing that once understood and fully theorised, the performative research paradigm will have applications beyond the arts and across the creative and cultural industries generally.
(Haseman 2006).
Two new interactive practise driven methodologies I wish to explore are:
1. The use of Augmented Reality as a means of creating invisible props that can respond to the performer.
2. The exploration of the performative use of Virtual Human technologies being developed by the Virtual Humans Research group at the Institute for Creative Technologies USC.
These two methodologies encompass two very different underlying forms of improvisation and interaction – the first seeks to create a space for improvisation, the unexpected and magic, relying more on performer improvisation than system improvisation. The second methodology places more emphasis on system improvisation, where characters have more “life” and the performer has to respond or interact with independent agent based entities.
In order to establish the feasibility of whether a Virtual Human might be used in a performative context I have downloaded the Virtual Human Toolkit which integrates with the Unity framework. The toolkit appears to offer many unusual and interesting capabilities, voice recognition, gaze awareness and the creation of scripts to define responses to user interactions.