Kinetic Soul: Experience Dance through Touch
Dance is an art we often look at to understand and connect with one another. To the visually impaired, however, connecting with someone’s dance is hard without sight. How might we redesign the way we experience a dance?
Kinetic Soul is a platform which enables the visually impaired to experience dance via kinetic feedback. Using a computer vision based system, a dancer’s movement is tracked, translated and conveyed through kinetic pins felt by the palms.
This platform conveys a dance through 32 dynamic pins. The kinetic feedback on one’s palms is 3D in nature, making it clearly perceivable through touch. Explorations on patterns formed by the pins, breaking down of dance, and forming of languages have been done and tested to understand how such feedback is perceived.
The platform communicates in two languages—L01 and L02, each serving a different purpose. L01 conveys the flow of dance while L02 communicates details of the deconstructed dance. With either languages, one can experience a dance in real-time, or relive one through a pre-recorded video, where they can pause and slow down their experience to appreciate the details.
