LuminAI Shows Off its Moves at San Francisco Art+Tech Festival

Posted June 21, 2018

By Michael Pearson

The Adaptive Digital Media Lab, or ADAM Lab, recently took its LuminAI interactive dance art installation to the Art+Tech Festival in San Francisco, where it was well received.

“The reaction was very positive in general,” said lab director Brian Margerko, an associate professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication.  “We saw a steady stream of attendees at both evening events coming up and dancing with LuminAI to teach it new dance moves.  People lit up when they saw they AI dancer repeat their moves or even perform complimentary moves to what they were doing.”

The version on display in San Francisco was a travel model that allows for easy setup, not the full geodesic dome version some in the Georgia Institute of Technology community might recognize.

LuminAI uses Microsoft Kinect videogame devices to capture the movements of a human dance partner, which are projected as a silhouette onto a screen. The computer then uses artificial intelligence based on a theory of dance and movement called Viewpoints to determine how to match the human partner’s moves.

The installation has changed some since its 2016 debut, said Magerko, whose lab is part of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. They include significant updates to the code behind the artificial intelligence that LuminAI uses to generate its moves, Magerko said.

“The AI correctly learns movements from interactors now, something it had trouble with in the past,” he said. “The visuals are also different.  We have gone from the ‘firefly’ model to a 3D ‘Tron-esque model’ to back to our roots, which is an experience very much like shadow theater.”

The installation also has appeared as part of an artist residency at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh and at the ACCelerate Festival at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.