http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.index ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// .bvh What is .bvh: short history of the file format document style: communication between machines and humans file format as a standard, what about standards *a file/document for everybody *file expanded on the floor *research intro *GenderBlending -> Possible Bodies, three years of looking at a document. Going back to the document became a method (? surface, interface, site) for research . Keeps expanding. movement and computation - what potentials do they open up? we used this file format as a vector to explore these questions.different things cross through this file format, (techincal matters, bodies and computation, texts..) which makes it a reach surface to settle on and operate from within and through it. *Annotation. Reading, testing, discussing, presenting ... *persisting in opening files (anecdote), database etc. * HIERARCHY text: ahmed, verticality parents and children: hierarchies, loops, linearity situation, situatedness *text Ahmed *stick figure *ROOT *cultural importance of the hip *how can a file like this be generative (body group) discovery of the hip *dance notation *eshkol notation *ref. stick figure OFFSET No ground datapoints, body is at 0, no ground text: parisi, uncomputable text: snelting, rocha: worldsettings for beginners *parisi text *worldsettings text *image no ground? *JOINT *data joints vs body joints *give examples of metaphores *(stick figure moves here) CHANNELS motioncapture: markerless vs. eh ... markerful? rotation, pavel. rotation information to movement (Euler) *pavel image or rotation explanation *Righthandmiddle2 *patented worlds: cunningham, buckminster fuller *patents *images of cunningham MOTION story of vectorial vs discrete text: portanova, discretion *Portanova 3 questions/groups What are the potentialities opened up when thinking movement into computation? MOVEMENT Parisi + Portanova What bodies could/does this file format create? What kind of (thoughts about) bodies create this file format? BODY Parisi + Ahmed Does location work at all, if there is no ground? Is displacement a movement, if there is no place? How do surfaces behave around this no-land's man, and what forces affect them? SPACE Parisi + Rocha, Snelting :-) 05/05 TODO FS cards red and white finish edit Cunningham AZ look for hand patent look for eshkol copyright statement + notation learns movements of eshkol choreography Set-up beforehand: Leftleg complete on the floor projection = stickfigure ? screen on the floor loops motion white things are already on floor (6 joints) indentation, motion, frames, frame times, patents, data points, red things = stack ---- AZ introduction contextualisation: motion capture, why this fileformat because we dared to look -- discoveries, share those FS Two lines about history -- Cannot open the file ... on-screen: show database, download file, close computer/screen off -- link to document in your hands and on the floor. ---- FS hierarchy, document, humans and machines FS starts right leg WHITE (3 joints) AZ hierarchy in thinking bodies, data joints and body joints, the metaphorical terminology and hierarchical logic of the file and the body. ---- AZ puts right leg RED FS datapoints, referentiality FS spine WHITE (4 joints) AZ going back to hip (at the top), cultural importance, the discovery of the hip by eshkol. do bodies escape computation or does computation create bodies? FS puts patent/license Eshkol document --- AZ spine RED AZ (has moved to the spine) an opposit example of how eshkol's movement restricts the body. AZ starts right arm WHITE (6 joints) FS rotation, three types of movement FS puts right arm RED -- AZ reads cunningham edit and shows movements FS unrolls patent documents: Buckminster fuller and xxxx AZ this body now/sofar has 2 legs, 1 spine and 1 arm and a hand and no fingers [leave some space] FS puts MOTION, frames, frame time WHITE FS explains: this body does not move yet, status of the file: ready to be moved transition to ending. AZ put all a4s with data FS story of vectorial vs discrete, ref. portanova maybe FS joins AZ until DONE 04/05 TO-DO in Stuttgart - check with Phil and/or Sina: continuous/vector or discontinous - check kinect setup etc. reading the file WHY contextualisation: motion capture, why this fileformat because we dared to look -- discoveries, share those --- the website, open file, plus story: how to open the file --- close screen, to the files on the table (with notes?). explain hierarchy how to read it from file. -- it feels a bit like french let the body lead the reading? becoming confident to speak about things Now back to our file: ROOT: hip and cultural importance Now back to our file: HIERARCHY: how the body can be seen through the structure of the document (conventional representation of a body, show how this influences movement (eshkol), tell about how eshkol also contributed to thinking of body differently) Position Rotation OFFSET Now back to our file: Indentation (definition of the contract) readability for humans and machines Now back to our file: JOINT and rigid bodies (joints are here to describe connections and not a body, but somehow they are forced onto each other) Now back to our file: Frames vs vectorial, continuity vs discrete, vision vs. math Frame time MOTION Now back to our file: CHANNELS degrees of freedom Now back to our file: JOINT and End Site organisation of this body, what parts; head end (root start) Now back to our file: End Site context, no world, no relations, no dependencies outside the document/frame local vs global context Representing a body Position, rotation 1: world of the foot ( Position, rotation 3: degrees of freedom MAYBE Position, rotation 2: euler angles (maybe?) What can we see from the file Where does this file sit/exist/come from Hierarchy/notation End you need to look, it creates world, you create world 03/03 Adva, Femke Reading 'Orientational metaphors; (Lakoff + Johnson). Referential text in dance practice for thinking on language vs body. Possibly outdated (1997), but interesting entry to reflect on metaphors, notation, programming and meaning -- how we oscillate between different modes of understanding these texts, ie bvh. (learning the language of a practice through another language (ballet in hebrew with french terminology; thinking through the dyslexic typographer) A connection to Hito Steyrl ('falling') and Sarah Ahmed? queer phenomenology orentation objects others. (last chapter on disorentation) Kinect troubles with horizontal posture, different systems of motion capture and consequences for understandings of movement/body/segments Lakoff + Johnson: looking at metaphors as an internalised system, based on experience. The experiental basis that produces CONSCIOUS is UP vs UNCONSCIOUS is DOWN is different from the one that produces MORE IS UP vs LESS IS DOWN (first set: base on sleeping/awake bodies, second set: stacking in a world with gravity). While the experiential basis might be different, according to Lakoff + Johnson, they observe how metaphors start to connect and produce 'coherence': HIGH STATUS is UP connects to HAPPY is UP. It is hard to pull those apart, to change orientation (a small person laying 'down' on the ground, how can we think of him/her as being 'high' status?) We realise how much the .bvh (and programming languages, markup) makes use of such engrained metaphorical systems, or 'common sense' and that we are looking for thinkers that help us go beyond. This is where Barad gets interesting again. The 'world of the foot' (the fact that up nor down is fixed in 3D) is inspiring, and helps us to try and rethink these spatial metaphors. Varela: autopoiesis, the mind is everywhere. The brain has a special place, but is not on top of thinking. Continuing Barad: scale (touching electrons, not 'a body' or 'object'). Remembering/reminding that the body is not whole, and how this changes many other things. The idea of thinking the body as whole is part of a system of 'meaning', not easy to undo. also - what we consider to be one body is actually a colony of many different interrelated living and non living entities. "Perhaps it takes facing the inhuman within us before com-passion -- suffering together with, participating with, feeling with, being moved by -- can be lived. How would we feel if it is by way of the inhuman that we come to feel, to care, to respond" Barad: inside-outside. 3D imagery, usually a lot of work done to confirm conventional notions of bodies as grounded, vertical, enclosed, whole. Once you let go of that work (starts to appears through glitch), images might appear of quite different bodily presence, orientations, relations between inside and outside. it might mean to keep the tools visible as a way to understand/remember the context, the protocols that are applied on the imagery that is produced. it might mean to let go of trying to construct humanoids. Details, fragments? spacetimemattering 29/2 Adva, Femke, Francois mocap is sampled, slices of time. unless flexometers. bvh = camera output = sampled 'as soon as you go to the computer it is numbers' Let’s conclude this chapter with an image of Cunningham-in-motion that exemplifies this global rootlessness. At the Museum of Modern Art in 1971, Cunningham danced his eccentric solo “Loops” in front of one of Jasper Johns’s “Map” paintings, based on Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Airocean Projection of the Globe. Fuller divided the surface of the earth into 20 equilateral spherical triangles in order to produce the most “objective” least distorted, two-dimensional projection of the globe to date. And in much the same way that Fuller and Johns flatten out the earth with scrupulous objectivity, Cunningham danced in a rootless way that demonstrated no special preference for any one spot. *** Laban -> https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/67/e2/70/67e270263d772053d80ae437a8db4a8b.jpg *** 28/2 Adva, Femke Jara Explaining 'plans' for Stuttgart: To stick with the fileformat. To do a collective reading of it. Deviate to other references, ideas: For Adva, the main thing -- why do we do it? what is it all for? movement, motion capture <-- focus on movement movement exists in computation, not just in the physical space (body) movement as a way to question relationship between virtual/physical/computational spaces to reflect on digital through movement. 1item: right hanf method -> determines orientation: backwards and forwarding determins computatioal space in movement mevement happens around the body if it is chosen as the reference [time + space dimensions]xyz axis [what are the minimal units of such novement?] what makes sense and what not from the particular to the collective units on the file: skeleton: segmentation disection into time: observation of points in space when this set of data gets processed by the computer, the atoms are put in motion // there is an inbetween? [this reminds me of barad: on touching -> http://differences.dukejournals.org/content/23/3/206.abstract] text of xxxnova: rethink binary not as / but 0 and 1 as to avoid and to maintain [and this connects with the BUT] Parisi's text -- the incomputable and instrumental possibility develop a mode of thinking through instrumentality // materiality from within the instrument * work with francois: snapshots into vectoral (not even visually rendered) movement: re-constructung path From within the artefact, to think from within the artefact, to change scale as a possibility not limit to individual, does not ask for the will of the movement minds are too often connected with "the" human ... micro choreographies of matter in an artefactual time-space, scaling up and down File formate specification 28/2 Adva, Femke (Michael), WTC25 to think dance, not just to do dance -- politics http://www.mercecunningham.org/index.cfm/choreography/dancedetail/params/work_ID/183/ Loops was performed in front of Jasper Johns' "Map (Based on Buckminster Fuller's "Dymaxion Airocean World)." Locations for 'invisible'/intangible movements (imperceptible to the human body?), and where they could take place: *Inverse kinematics: Reversed movement (?) Mathematical movement of the starting point, re-ordering movement *Euler angles: computing how movement is translated to vector space *Degrees of freedom: potential/restriction of possible dimensions of movement *The world of the foot. Point 0 of a space changes, this means there is movement? *Coordinate system, frame of reference, rotating directions MM: "don't move your fingers, the body is actually like a reference system" Letting new concepts, ideas coming out of the tech/tools itself without claims on disciplinary knowledge (tech). Movement is in so many places, but thinking movement is a way of practicing the proposition. From plausible to possible. When we say movement, we don't mean represention of movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-hand_rule abstraction and the body http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/clean-digital-dancing https://research.cs.wisc.edu/graphics/Courses/cs-838-1999/Jeff/BVH.html 27/2 Adva, Femke, WTC25 Two philosophical offerings of potential: The incomputabl and instrumental possibility (Parisi, Majaca) and Stamatia Portanova, Moving without a body. Is it 'just' philosophy? Limitations of the tool, notion of endlessness. It is exciting (as an idea) but what does it change in the way we move, relate? microproduction, between the dots to take the invitation to think about the creative potential of the 'uncomputable', and think together where it is actualised From which door we enter ... Lilith -- fantasize other examples, examples of our own? Imagine what it would mean, what consequences. Remember the hip. Relating to the world differently, an archive of movements re-using movements -- from choreography to military to ... movements stored or externalised, movement locked outside ... what does it mean. Potential but also closing, movement that is abstract becomes material through the digital -- that is scary. Categorising movement? Potential vs confinement representing movement -- experiencing bodies a real movement -- what is that. different spaces, different movements ---- "the world of" the context -- what does it do to the way we think. opticalisation of movement Motion capture: the problematics of understanding/experiencing movement through the visual (capture + rendering) M O T I O N C A P T U R E gait [g?t]: the manner or style of walking. gait analysis evaluation of the manner or style of walking, usually done by observing the individual walking naturally in a straight line. The normal forward step consists of two phases: the stance phase, during which one leg and foot are bearing most or all of the body weight, and the swing phase, during which the foot is not touching the walking surface and the body weight is borne by the other leg and foot. In a complete two-step cycle both feet are in contact with the floor at the same time for about 25 per cent of the time. This part of the cycle is called the double-support phase. http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/gait The cultural condition of the hip A culturally respected articulation the energy of life -- tantra where you produce life Dance: "keeping the center" time it was invented: from ballet to be on the floor, floor as a partner first: hip part of the torso. Through the dance notation, you need to separate bodyparts. If you write the hip, it starts to be possible to move it. revolution of the hip why biological habits are reproduced in the file format? cascade coil/spiral rhizome this results in the representation of movement fileformat as a hypothesis assumption: movement is self-generated questions: - what about movement from the outside (gravity? outside forces?) - -------- Irina Kaldrack https://vimeo.com/77526442 What does this to movement? ----- Researching connection notation, storage files/data capture/.bvh. Eshkol notation. http://snelting.domainepublic.net/tools/tying-the-story-to-data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eshkol-Wachman_movement_notation Invite someone to teach us Eshkol? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VASzx30xKqo No relation to the space, no dependency on the space; the body on an invisible grid. Decontextualisation? ----- Rotography https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/US_patent_1242674_figure_3.png http://www.pnas.org/content/101/32/11909.full photographic to graphic ----- Inverse kinematics, cancelling/compensating motions (ref: medical technology "correcting" for movement) Kinnect has a database of pre-existing movements production and reproduction gait drones http://www.learnaboutrobots.com/inverseKinematics.htm afference, efference, reafference, exafference ----- "uncanny valley" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley ---- Mathematical movement/hidden movement: Gimbal lock, Euler angle, degrees-of-freedom (channel), quaternxxxx (rotation in 4 dimensions) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm8tzzfy1Uw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJOX8DWLzGc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6lf8t9WXn8 (euler) [Popping and locking, breakdance, ...] +Vogue! : staticism translated to movement: transmedia // dance battles based on queer situated categories https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hedJer7I1vI ---- Point systems, bodies as moving points, fractured bodies (?) -> from points to vectors; from cinematic to computational movement 3 layers of movement, generating movement, where is movement, chronology (process of capture to vectorial to rendered movement) ---- muscles moving the skeleton and vice versa. Order of movement, what moves what. (hierarchy) Release technique? ---- "the world of the foot" eshkol is also a kind of the world of the foot (the body is seperated from its context) situated/decontextualised movement. The movement orients the world ---- rhizome vs treestructure, body as linear hierarchy ---- body as a container, as a surface -> movement as .... Metaphors we live by / George Lakof ---- Researching domains of application, military vs medical vs dance vs ... Photography, framing, capture (performing hysteria); Muybridge, Marey "to touch the inner part of the avatar" androgynous? what touches what? http://tanukis.frankiezafe.org/index.php?title=Main_Page Lisa Nelson project Francois and Louise --------------- "the world of the foot" Trying out Eshkol notation --------------------------------- 4/11 how do you move with the world? what moves against the world? how does the world move with you? how do you describe the world? how do you make the world move? Adva: it is disturbing how esthetic movements and weapons are thought through the same way of describing world. What movement do we have in common? think of the biovision file format as a narrative thread, a "text" ... produce, develop a series of "modules" that are calleable, available when "reading" the text, a collection of movements (this is still/excitedly pedagogical; it is a toolkit so that is inspiring initself but it is not yet another way to move) - to capture a toolkit of movement (.bvh, map to avatar) - If we would understand computational movement, we would be able to think of physical movement differently. - The story of the discovery of the hip (ref. Sofia) - The principle of the Gimbal lock - The principle of the Euler angle: "How did you get there?" - Multiplicity vs. dissection -- multiplication (ie production) of mathematical movements in order to read physical movement/generate computational movement - Zeno and the doctor - Discussion between Seda and Antoinette: Antoinette - life escapes computing. Seda: computing makes world. Parisi meets Octavia Butler meets Rouvroy http://www.e-flux.com/journal/77/76322/the-incomputable-and-instrumental-possibility/ - What do we say when we say movement - Notating movement (tediousness) - Hysterical arc - devices: rotograph, gimbal, durer 'window', xxxx - language, metaphors of thinking through the 'body' = 'movement' - Reverse kinematics, cancelling motions (ref: medical technology "correcting" for movement) - "uncanny valley" - "degrees of freedom" - Popping and locking, breakdance + systems, bodies as moving points, fractured bodies - "the world of the foot" - domains of application, military vs medical vs dance vs ... drone - where does movement happen -- movement mind, disembodied movement, ... moving at the other side of the world - situation/location taken out of movement ////////////////////////////////////// https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/gimbals.html ///////////////////////////////////// CAPTURE "Motion capture (Mo-cap for short) is the process of recording the movement of objects or people. It is used in military, entertainment, sports, medical applications, and for validation of computer vision[2] and robotics. In filmmaking and video game development, it refers to recording actions of human actors, and using that information to animate digital character models in 2D or 3D computer animation.[3][4][5] When it includes face and fingers or captures subtle expressions, it is often referred to as performance capture.[6] In many fields, motion capture is sometimes called motion tracking, but in filmmaking and games, motion tracking usually refers more to match moving." (WP) Fileformats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motion_and_gesture_file_formats Relations between practices, devices and formats Different expectations of what is being captured. Ways to capture motion: *Mechanical -- let's try test this? *exoskeleton *Optical *Electromagnetic (magnetic) Timeline: http://motioncapturesociety.com/resources/industry-history Early history: https://www.siggraph.org/education/materials/HyperGraph/animation/character_animation/motion_capture/history1.htm Instructionism / http://www.inflexions.org/tangents/sydney/generativethought.html / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqKRLiVJsEQ / http://www.inflexions.org/tangents/sydney/generative.pdf *Microecologies of movement *Transferred/contagious movements Databases, files Find out about animation databases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animation_database (all more or less 10 years old?) *Capturing traditional dance moves https://dancedb.cs.ucy.ac.cy/main/performances *Open Motion Lab http://accad.osu.edu/research/mocap/mocap_data.htm *CMU Graphics Lab Motion Capture Database http://mocap.cs.cmu.edu/subjects.php *Motion Capture Database HDM05 http://resources.mpi-inf.mpg.de/HDM05/ *"Dataset for A Data-Driven Appearance Model for Human Fatigue", Includes "Emotional Body Language" (2012!) https://fling.seas.upenn.edu/~mocap/cgi-bin/Database.php ("The SIG Center for Computer Graphics houses the research Center for Human Modeling and Simulation.") *Cooking: pizza, eggs, salad http://kitchen.cs.cmu.edu/main.php *cgspeed Motion Capture : links and information about Motion Capture software and datasets https://sites.google.com/a/cgspeed.com/cgspeed/motion-capture Softwares *http://bioviewer.sourceforge.net/ bvh viewer (linux) *Brekel Kinect Tool: skeleton tracking with Kinect which can be exported as BVH files http://www.brekel.com/?page_id=155 *bvhacker: free bvh file editing tool ideally suited for final preparation of bvh files for upload to Second Life *Blender + makewalk *BVH Helper: a suite of Python tools to aid the import of BVH files into Poser *BVHplay: a free, open-source BVH animation player *Life Forms Studio 5: the most powerful character-animation package in its price-range *SimFonIA: innovative plugin for 3D animation for SketchUp *iClone 5: real-time 3D animation *bvh player for iPad : bvh files can be imported by email or iTunes http://www.academia.edu/15291541/Creating_a_Library_of_Gestures_with_Variants "What we obtain from a motion capture session is a set of unconnected dots that portray an individual’s motion sequence. It is at this point that the first level of interpretation begins, an important aspect of which is detection of manipulative intent. The collection of dots, known, as cloud points must be identified, and in most situations will indicate the joint centers of an individual body." (Lisa Naugle, Reflections on Dancing with William Forsythe, 2000) "Markerless Motion Capture" http://www.organicmotion.com/markerless-mocap-data/hnology fps? The camera is in there ... Different techniques we could try, look into (F/LOSS?) Need to talk ot Francois Z ... *.bvh to Blender *Gesture Recognition Toolkit: https://github.com/nickgillian/grt/blob/master/README.md *OpenMocap: https://github.com/davidflam/OpenMoCap *Android gesture detection "Learn how to detect basic touch gestures such as scrolling, flinging, and double-tapping" https://developer.android.com/training/gestures/detector.html Non-free *Kinect *Wii *... Suits http://diyourself.ru/living/puppeteer-motion-capture-costume-do-it-yourself.html ALIGNMENT "contemporary computational processing is moving from an automatic recognition of data only to also encompassing a certain degree of attentive recognition, as neural networks automatically and attentive transform data to fit the model they operate by. Always processing and always calculating probabilities this new form of governance is truly modulatory and preemptive in its algorithmic reproduction of the same patterns in new data." https://machineresearch.wordpress.com/2016/09/26/soren-rasmussen/ "default skeleton" https://github.com/davidflam/OpenMoCap/blob/master/OpenMoCap/Resources/skeleton/default.bvh "match movement" "face recognition" Description and Recognition of Curved Objects http://sicv.activearchives.org/logbook/piece-correspondences/ Automatic transcription: Gentle gentle alignment (translation, expectation: what to listen for?) https://lowerquality.com/gentle/ "Dense capture" *Densecap captioning system implemented at Stanford Vision Lab on the video of the Atlas humanoid robot designed by Boston Dynamics :-/ https://vimeo.com/173025372 *translation, reading, mistranslation Expectation, prediction - "what does it want" *Adam Harvey CV Dazzle (2014) http://cvdazzle.com *Recognizing a dance movement http://dm.lmc.gatech.edu/research/labs/digital-world-image-group/subway/ Same movement, different bodies SYSTEMS + VOCABULARIES (NOTATION) What regime/perspective to put on the body, what counts as a body .bvh = bipeds, ie only moving targets with two legs. Andrés Fernández http://www.debajodelsombrero.org/nuevaweb/andres.html Anatomy Copyright Capturing gestures - what about copyright? Kobe Matthys - Agency? Smartphone moves - Karlsruhe julien previeux - 'what shall we do next', patented gestures ---- 05/10/2016 Jara + Femke completedness of the body: idea of an individual (a moving thing with two legs) bidirectionality in some cases: translation is always based (?) on datapoints, mapped to a "skeleton" from continuous to discrete to "suggested continuity" Tirso said that there are 2 ways of 3D modelling: departing from inner structure (skeleton), and pushing-pulling the mesh, actually like clay does ah yes. But here, in this case it is not so much about modelling volume, but translating movement from physical to computational space. buen in the case of translating movement to a pre-existing virtual body... would it work, the motion capture file, in a body that has been modelled without skeleton? it seems not ... so the movement is always calculated according to a trajectory of points. But we could look for ways those points can be mapped on a virtual volume without skeleton, so far i haven't seen it. On the other hand, if you move a box in space ... So how do non-rigid objects move in virtual space, moving things that have "joints" (?) It seems the skeleton defines how the different elements move together, how they influence each other but what about this: http://cloud.constantvzw.org/index.php/s/LxYYiqcbojNoNtF Tirso experiment: Affecting a trajectory real-time ... (with DAZ http://www.daz3d.com ) The movement can be from inside or outside "there is no inner structure" -> http://cloud.constantvzw.org/index.php/f/21103 Liquidness, collapse ... fascia & connective tissue Rigidness to the volume -- responding to certain inputs, but not to others. No "bounce", "gravity" So how is the movement get stored, can this movement be exported, can the mesh pull-push a body elsewhere? "i add this video, a layer i still could not craft, so by now it is just a projected image [nice!] that comes from fragmented bodies. I call it "chicharrones 3d" (chicharrones=http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JvWuR3fI5wY/UJYzRuUPDxI/AAAAAAAAB9U/ej1YspTj_gU/s1600/DSC_1359.JPG), the trajectories of these pieces of flesh (edible?) can be manipulated realtime while they connect with other bodies/pieces in a multispace." what type of connections, what does that mean when they are other than mimicking "skeleton" or other pseudo naturalist constructs? motion capture of multiple bodies and objects multiple motion captions projected on a "singular" computational object agnosis -- shapes that cannot be processed Making a sandwich: http://cloud.constantvzw.org/index.php/s/dY5xu4Fmzw5nIGD ---------- 08/10/2015 Adva + Femke Reading bvh files http://research.cs.wisc.edu/graphics/Courses/cs-838-1999/Jeff/BVH.html Various skeleton skeleton definitions possible; root is always hip; set-up hierarchical (XML) Body set-up: Root [A] joins to three child segments: [B1], [B2] and [B3]. [B3] joins two sub-child segments, [C1] and [C2]. Points on the body: accupuncture (what other segmented body systems can we think of?) What about commercial set-ups? (understanding three cultures producing motion capture files: university labs, indie gaming/home studios, hollywood production) Difference between modelling motion (= drawing, animation) and capturing (discrete, scanning, resolution/fps) The position of rigid bodies in space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigid_body_dynamics#/media/File:Rigid_bodies.jpg "The dynamics of a rigid body system is described by the laws of kinematics and by the application of Newton's second law (kinetics) or their derivative form Lagrangian mechanics. The solution of these equations of motion provides a description of the position, the motion and the acceleration of the individual components of the system and overall the system itself, as a function of time. The formulation and solution of rigid body dynamics is an important tool in the computer simulation of mechanical systems." Re-reading Stamatia Portanova Understanding "mathematical movement", from x-y-z coordinates to Eulen angle via The Matrix Merce Cunningham BIPED http://www.mercecunningham.org/index.cfm/choreography/dancedetail/params/work_ID/165/ Golan Levin on Cunningham http://www.flong.com/projects/merce/ Motion capture: http://openendedgroup.com/artworks/hds_process.html http://openendedgroup.com/index.php/artworks/loops-2001-present/open-acess-data/ :-/ .bvh acts as a boundary object between practices and bodies "Biped uses rotational data stored in the BVH format to pose a Biped character on a frame-by-frame basis and to move it forward in time. During import, XYZ Euler joint rotations stored in the BVH file are used to derive Quaternion bone rotation data for the biped at each frame." "The BVA format is an ASCII file that contains no skeleton hierarchy but only the motion data with a fixed order of transformation. The BVH format is a binary file that contains both a skeleton and motion capture data and allows each segment of a skeleton to have a specified order of transformation. A drawback of the BVH format is that it lacks a full definition of the initial pose. Another drawback is that the format has only translational offsets of children segments from their parents. No rotational offset can be defined. Moreover, the BVH format is often implemented differently in different applications, that is, one BVH format that works well in one application may not be interpreted in another. All the same the format is very flexible and it is relatively easy to edit BVH files." "In the early 1990s, a few companies started offering motion capture services to other production companies. The early players were Biovision in San Francisco and TSi in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The systems used were optical and the software to solve the motion data was all proprietary, because the few companies that sold optical motion capture equipment didn’t have biomechanical solvers that could deliver data useable for animation to any of the current 3D animation software programs. Entertainment was a brand new market for them as they have been servicing mostly the Life Sciences sector at that time, so they looked at the service bureaus to help them access the market." "Biovision, a company that used to operate three sports analysis studios across the country, claimed to have helped professional golfer John Daly to find a problem related to opposite movements of his hips and shoulders that happened for one-tenth of a second during his swing. Tiger Woods has done his share of motion-captured golfing for all his PGA video games. His swing has been analyzed and broken down to the smallest component in order to teach others what a perfect swing must look like." Understanding Motion Capture for Computer Animation, Albert Menache (2010) http://excelsior.biosci.ohio-state.edu/~carlson/history/ http://www.btsbioengineering.com/products/kinematics/ -- medical company that developed early motion capture http://www.motionrealityincorporated.com/ military use "Motion Reality’s VIRTSIM™ system was first developed for military use during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In 2012, Motion Reality began a heavy push to sell in the military and law enforcement markets. VIRTSIM™ is an integrated system including full-body sensor kits for participants, head-mounted displays, instrumented replica weapons, intelligent cameras, man-wearable computers, muscle stimulation equipment, and infrastructure including rack servers,and a sophisticated software suite. Although VIRTSIM™ ships with a large number of premade scenarios with integrated in-game AI characters, military and law enforcement groups can also create their own virtual worlds and customize their training scenarios with minimal technical expertise using Motion Reality’s software." Motion planning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_planning ("inverse kinematics") retargeting outsourcing http://www.pentamedia.in/training/ ================================== *Reading Room: The BioVision Hierarchy file format* This edition of Reading Room will be dedicated to a collaborative dissection of the BioVision Hierarchy file format. BioVision Hierarchy (.bvh) is an ASCII file format used to import data from various motion capture systems into 3D-animation software. It was developed in the mid-nineties and remains one of the most commonly used file-formats for transposing movement captured in physical space, to a computational environment. Around this relatively legible format, a rich ecology of software tools developed. The file-format functions as a boundary object between practices and bodies, as it is used by animators, game developers, interface researchers, medical professionals, dance-historians, sports-analysts and engineers. Together we will analyse the .bvh specifications and samples of the file format in order to understand what imaginaries of the body are encoded into it, what a bipedal skeleton hierarchy consists of, and how rotational data for rigid bodies might constitute a movement in itself. This dissection of the .bvh file format is developed with Adva Zakai in the context of Possible Bodies, a collaborative research initiated by Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting on the very concrete and at the same time complex and fictional entities that "bodies" are, and the matter-cultural conditions of possibility that render them present. Adva Zakai is a choreographer, performer and curator who explores how body and language are perceived through each other. http://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/ Femke Snelting develops projects at the intersection of design, feminism and Free Software. She is member of Constant, a non-profit, artist-run association for art and media based in Brussels. She co-initiated the design/research team OSP and the Libre Graphics Research Unit to investigate how digital tools and creative practice might co-construct each other. With delegates Jara Rocha, Seda Guerses and Miriyam Aouragh she takes part in the Darmstadt Delegation, assigned to explore techno-political and socio-emotional relationships between activist and technological practice. She was an Art, Science and Business fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude and currently teaches at a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies, Brussels) and Piet Zwart Institute (Media Design: experimental publishing, Rotterdam). ================================== http://www.tinkering.net/animation/ http://www2.biusante.parisdescartes.fr