Hello, in this video, we will look at mobile technologies
for studying music and body motion.
In the laboratory setting, we are
able to use highly advanced infrared optical motion capture
systems to study, very precisely,
how people move to music.
But, sometimes, we need to go outside the lab
and study how people move in the real world,
how people move while listening to music on the metro,
on the bus, or in the dance club.
For this reason, we need to have some sort
of mobile technology for studying music and body motion.
In front of me, I have a couple of examples
of such technologies.
One of the advantages of this system
is that it can be very, very small,
such as this accelerometer.
Imagine studying body motion in a dance club
where you can put this in the pocket of every dancer
in the club, and you get some data on how they move
and can see how this relates to the music
and how they compare to each other.
Accelerometers and gyroscopes and also magnetometers
are inside every-- basically, at least
every mobile phone these days.
So everybody, in practise, has their own motion capture
technology that they carry around.
More specialised systems also exist,
such as this bracelet which contains a sensor that measure
muscle tension, in addition to the accelerometer and gyroscope
that lets you measure the direction of the bracelet
and also how fast it accelerates, like this.
So it will tell you which direction I point
and how I turned my hand because of the muscle sensors.
This suit is a motion capture suit from Accents Technologies.
It contains 17 of these orange sensors
and, inside each of these, there's
a magnetometer and gyroscope and accelerometer,
which measures inertia and acceleration
and the magnetic flux, or basically a compass.
Combining 17 of the sensors with a model of a human body,
saying that, for instance, this sensor and this sensor
can't move further apart than this and this sensor
and this sensor can only move in this angle,
it's possible to get an estimation of how
the pose of the person is at any time.
And the result you get is quite good, actually,
from thinking that this is-- this type of technology,
there are no cameras involved.
The system is portable with two cylinders, like this.
And it's possible to move quite far
away from the transmitter, which is right next to our computer.
So looking at the screen now, my head is upright
and the avatar is following my movements.
We tested it up to 50 metres without problems.
The one small problem with this system is that it's drifting,
so if you move around a lot and go back to the same place,
you will possibly have a result that diverges slightly.
And also, it's not able to give you millimetre position,
like you get in the optical systems.
Still, it's remarkably good and absolutely a good way
of measuring body movement.
What you can see here is that there's quite a lot of cables,
so using it in, for instance a stage performance,
requires that you are aware of your system.
And you will not be able to move as freely
as without the system.
But we've used it in several performances,
and you can use it as a DJ to control DJ sets
or as a musical instrument.
[PLAYING GUITAR]