An immersive interactive experience of contemporary aboriginal dance at the Gallery of First Australians

Dr. Stephen Barrass
CSIRO-MIS, Interactive Modelling & Visualisation Systems

Tuesday 17 April at 11am

Abstract

I will describe the concept and realisation of a walk-through experience of Aboriginal dance in the Welcome area of the Gallery of First Australians (GFA) at the new National Museum of Australia (NMA) which opened on March 11. The experience is an immersive multimedia environment with a perceptual user interface that extracts footstep features in real-time from 32 square metres of vibration sensitive carpet. Six network sychronised PC workstations process the footstep features and render the interactive 3d graphics and surround sound effects over six data projectors and thirty speakers mounted in the gallery.

The experience is based on a cycle of six dances that reflect cultures from different parts of the country - a men's dance, a women's dance, a fishing dance, a drumming dance, a rainbow serpent story, and an urban dance. The six dancers are projected life-size onto the walls of the gallery - three on each side. Images from the GFA collection of paintings by aboriginal children are integrated with the dance and music. The image of a snake sculpture from the GFA collections circles the room in the period between dances.

I will present the design and outline of the system, experiences gained in developing the software and producing the media, and observations of visitor responses to the installation.

Short resume

I am a reseacher in the IMVS group at the CSIRO CMIS in Canberra where I focus on the design of interaction and the use of sound in Virtual Environment interfaces. I just completed a 1 year fully funded project for the National Museum of Australia. Other current projects include an immersive 3d sound design studio in collaboration with an engineering honours student and the ANU computer science department, and work on the automatic synthesis of material sounds in collaborative haptics using MPEG4. I have spent 18 months as a post-doc in the Virtual Environments group at the German National IT research institute (GMD) in Bonn where I worked on sonification of multidimensional oil and gas well-logs on the Responsive Workbench, and immersive interfaces for stories, music and games in the Cyberstage. Prior to that I worked in the DMIS group where I  proposed and developed an MPEG audio navigation tool using signal processing and segmentation algorithms in the compressed domain which has continued to be developed in that group over the past four years. I am on the Board of the International Community for Auditory Display ICAD www.icad.org. I have a Phd. in Information Technology from the ANU in 1996 on the topic of Auditory Information Design and a Bach Elec Eng (hons) from UNSW in 1987 on the topic Computer Generated Holograms.

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