Becoming Dragon: a mixed reality durational performance in Second Life

Abstract

The goal for Becoming Dragon was to develop a working, immersive Mixed Reality system by using a motion capture system and head mounted display to control a character Second Life - a Massively Multiplayer Online 3D environment - order to examine a number of questions regarding identity, gender and transformative potential of technology. This performance was accomplished through a collaboration between Micha Cardenas, performer and technical director, Christopher Head, Kael Greco, Benjamin Lotan, Anna Storelli and Elle Mehrmand. The plan for this project was to model performer's physical environment to enable them to live virtual environment for extended amounts of time, using an approach of Mixed Reality, where physical world is mapped into virtual. I remain critical of concept of Mixed Reality, as it presents an idea of realities as totalities and as objective essences independent of interpretation through symbolic order. Part of my goal this project is to explore identity as a process of social feedback, sense that Donna Haraway describes with iii , as well as to explore concept of Reality Spectrum that Augmentology.com discusses, thinking about states such as AFK (Away From Keyboard) that are in-between virtual and corporeal presence. iv Both of these ideas are ways of overcoming the dualisms of mind/body, real/virtual and self/other that have been a problematic part of thinking about technology for so long. Towards thinking beyond these binaries, Anna Munster offers a concept of enfolding body and technologyv, building on Gilles Deleuze's notion of baroque fold. She says the superfold... opens up for us a twisted topology of code folding back upon itself without determinate start or end points: we now live a time and space which body and information are thoroughly imbricated. vi She elaborates on this notion of body and code as becoming each other saying the incorporeal vectors of digital information draw out capacities of our bodies to become other than matter conceived as a mere vessel for consciousness or a substrate for signal... we may also conceive of these experiences as a new territory made possible by fact that our bodies are immanently open to these kinds of technically symbiotic transformations vii . A number of technologies used this performance were used an attempt to blur line between actual and digital, such as motion capture, live video streaming into Second Life and 3D fabrication of physical copies of Second Life avatars. The performance was developed using following components: - An Emagin Z800 immersive head mounted display (HMD) allowed performer to move around the physical environment within Calit2 and still remain in game. Head tracking and stereoscopic imagery help to provide a realistic feeling of immersion. We built on University of Michigan 3D (UM3D) lab's stereoscopic patch for Second Life client, updating it to work latest version of Second Life. - A motion tracking system. A Vicon MX40+ motion capture system was installed into Visiting Artist Lab at CRCA, which served as physical performance space, to allow real-time motion tracking data to be sent to a PC running Windows. Using this data, plan was to map physical motion real world back into game space, so that, for example, performer could easily get to their food source or to restroom. We developed a C++ bridge that includes a parser for Vicon real time data stream order to communicate this to Second Life server to produce changes avatar and object positions based on real physical movement. The goal was to get complete body gestures into Second Life near real time. - A Puredata patch called Lila, developed by Shahrokh Yadegadi of UCSD, which was used to modulate the performer's voice, to provide a voice system that allowed chat ability Second Life, which was less gendered and less human.