The challenge
After winning a two-year grant from the Bloomberg Philanthropies Digital Accelerator programme, Birmingham Royal Ballet wanted to explore how a large, publicly-funded arts organisation can incorporate immersive technologies.
The response
Birmingham Royal Ballet Creative Content Producer, Tom Rogers, approached Holosphere based on our experience in motion capture.
Creative Digital Consultant, Matthew Clugston, worked with the Holosphere team to craft dynamic, interactive, real-time visuals. These were generated and amplified dynamically by the movements of dancers Kit Holder (BRB First Soloist & BRB2 Artistic Coordinator) and BRB2 founding member Oscar Kempsey-Fagg, using low-latency motion capture.
Working with Unreal Engine 5, the team could change the visuals on the fly. As these were projected on Holosphere’s giant 35m immersive backdrop, the performers were able to interact with their own moving images, each feeding off the other, creating a new type of dance performance where their body movements drove the content.
Holosphere Director Sean Duffy said, “Our project with Birmingham Royal Ballet used mo-cap tracking technology designed to achieve the accuracy and low latency needed for VR applications, along with a distributed real-time graphics rendering system more commonly used on big-budget film and TV sets, such as Disney’s The Mandalorian.”
The result
The proof of concept worked flawlessly and demonstrated the creative power of combining motion capture, dance, and real-time visuals to present a new form of art.
Such fusion allows audiences to experience unique performances that are not rehearsed or repeatable, bringing new energy to their experience.
Holosphere also used the motion capture data, to create virtual and augmented reality versions, that could be enjoyed on a headset or tablet computer.
Looking to the future, Rogers sees huge potential: “To get a dancer in front of this work and see how the artwork is created is quite a beautiful thing. I think the sky’s the limit in terms of what you could do with it now; there are so many potential applications.”
This could mean a whole new art form for the dancers, too, according to Holder: “I was thrilled to work with the team at Holosphere and explore the collaborative possibilities. I came away thoroughly inspired and excited by the prospect of a truly original and engaging endeavour which could showcase the potential of marrying this technology with dance.”