Dance in augmented reality: calibration and applications

Dance expresses and translates human experience into meaningful body forms, transcending cultural barriers and language. Ideas and concepts can be portrayed through each dancer's movement on the stage. Mixing cutting edge technologies into contemporary fine arts creates opportunities for human imagination and advances development of futuristic technologies. Augmented Reality (AR) is this technology, and we envision the use of AR in avantgarde dance, interactive media, and story telling. Dance and Engineering in Augmented Reality (DEAR) is a collaborative effort between artists and engineers. Through this project, we will realize multiple creative works that take advantage of AR in an integral and non trivial manner. As part of this paper, we describe our application of the technology in dance and propose a simple projector camera calibration method for projection mapping installations. With an easier setup, we hope enable and inspire future AR pieces from talented artists, computer engineers and computer scientists.