Milan Pradhan
Senior Certificate Project '02
My project is a real-time presentation of Bharatnatyam (an Indian classical dance form) in an innovative and interactive way. Basically, a Bharatnatyam dancer will be signaling from a set of gestures. Presently there are three different gestures tosignal a wave, Lord Krishna, and a dance piece about hand expressions. Choosing one of the three gestures, the dancer then commences on a dance that relates to the gesture she has signaled. Additionally, she will have the liberty of setting the pace of the dance by controlling the music’s tempo by herself, all in real-time. Simultaneously, audio/visual depictions of these dances will be shown on a projector screen above the dancer.

I have divided the whole program into two main modules:

Video: A real-time processing camera captures her forms and sends the information to the computer, which filters out the pixel information of the video frames and processes the image to recognize one of the gestures. Then it asserts that a certain gesture has been signaled by the dancer. The audio and visual parts then takes over.

Audio: A microphone positioned near her feet picks up her feet stamps and sends these feeds in to the computer. The time at which these beats came in are fed into a time-difference array. The program then looks for a recognized pattern among a number of most recent beats, and once found starts the midi file that is associated with the already recognized gesture. The program determines the tempo to play this file based on the estimated time of the next beat, and updates the beat time of the currently playing midi file with this new tempo. Thus the dancer controls the tempo in real-time.
While the dancer is moving there are animations being projected on the screen behind her. These animations reflect the kind of piece she has chosen; they are triggered by her gestures.
This project was created in a 3D virtual reality world using Sense8 World Toolkit libraries; a video camera and a microphone are also necessary, as well as a projection screen behind the dancer. More information is on my web site at http://oak.conncoll.edu/~mpra/cat/