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ï~~SENSE/STAGE - LOW COST, OPEN SOURCE WIRELESS SENSOR
INFRASTRUCTURE FOR LIVE PERFORMANCE AND INTERACTIVE,
REAL-TIME ENVIRONMENTS
Marije A.J. Baalman, Vincent de Belleval
Christopher L. Salter
Concordia University
Design and Computation Arts
ABSTRACT
SenseStage is a research-creation project to develop a wireless sensor network infrastructure for live performance and
interactive, real-time environments. The project is motivated by the economic and technical constraints of live performance contexts and the lack of existing tools for artistic
work with wireless sensing platforms. The development is
situated within professional artistic contexts and tested in
real world scenarios. In this paper we discuss our choice of
wireless platform, the design of the hardware and firmware,
battery options, and an evaluation of the data transmission
quality within the wireless network. Additionally, software
integration of the wireless platform with popular media programming environments is addressed, as well as evaluation
and dissemination of the technology through workshops. Finally, we elaborate on the application of the hardware and
software infrastructure in professional artistic projects: two
dance performances, two media projects involving environmental data and an interactive, multi-sensory installation.
1. INTRODUCTION
SenseStage is a research-creation project to develop small,
low cost and low power wireless sensor hardware together
with software infrastructure specifically for use in live theater, dance and music performance as well as for the design
of interactive, real-time environments involving distributed,
heterogeneous sensing modalities. The project consists of
three components:
* a series of small, battery powered wireless PCBs that
can acquire and transmit input from a range of analog
and digital sensors,
* an open source software environment that enables the
real-time sharing of such sensor data among designers
and
* plug in modules that enable the analysis of such sensor data streams in order to provide building blocks
for the generation of complex dynamics for output
media.
Joseph Malloch, Joseph Thibodeau
Marcelo M. Wanderley
McGill University
Music Technology, IDMIL
The project emerged from a desire to address a novel,
emerging research field: distributed, wireless sensing networks for real-time composition using many forms of output
media including sound, video, lighting, mechatronic and actuation devices and similar. The design of interactive environments using diverse output media increasingly involves
the mapping of many channels of real-time sensor data to
control the temporal behavior of such media. Standard mapping techniques with sensors that have been derived from
the "instrument building" paradigm [7] usually address only
small numbers of sensors or participants and may not scale
well to larger spaces. Systems involving large numbers of
sensors and participants are rare, custom-designed, and expensive [6]. Furthermore, while wireless sensors and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are being increasingly deployed
daily in areas such as health care, defense, seismology and
home security, there are scant examples of such technologies in artistic projects simply due to the lack of available
hardware/software infrastructure for artists to use. Most
work in sensor networks has been in areas of applied technology development [10] without artistic aims or is restricted
to lab settings. Based on these factors, SenseStage has developed a fully integrated hardware and software infrastructure that is intuitive to use by artists and designers, is scaleable
to many nodes and performs data acquisition, transmission,
conditioning, sharing and compositional tasks all within the
same system.
2. BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION
Three specific factors have motivated the SenseStage project:
1) Economic and technical constraints of live performance: While there is increasing interest in the use of sensing technologies in live performance contexts (particularly
theater, dance and music-theater), the economic and cultural constraints of live performance make the integration
and use of such experimental technologies difficult. Long
rehearsal periods and proper technical infrastructure necessary to test and use sensing systems are prohibitively expensive for artists and cultural institutions. Furthermore,
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