As part of the Ballet Wichita’s Innovations performance April 2024 I teamed up with Wichita State University’s Shocker Studios to track a dancer live, reinterpreting their motions on a stage-sized display behind them. Wichita State University’s Fairmount String Trio accompanied the dance, performing Dohnányi’s Serenade.
To track the dancer we used 3 Vive 3.0 trackers paired with 4 Vive 2.0 base stations. We then interfaced Unreal Engine 5.3 to the trackers and mapped them to Unreal’s Niagara particle system.
Brian Foster did the bulk of the heavy lifting building the Niagara system in Unreal Engine. After the project ended, he further developed the technical aspects of this work by tracking dancers in Shocker Studios’ motion capture lab and expanding his use of Unreal’s Niagara particle system.
