Designing Glitch Procedures and Visualisation Workflows for Markerless Live Motion Capture of Contemporary Dance

This paper presents a case study in the exploration and creative usage of errors and glitches in the real-time markerless motion capture of contemporary dance. We developed a typology of MoCap failures comprised of seven categories, allowing the user to situate each distinct error in the respective stage of the motion capture pipeline. This way, glitch procedures for the creative use of 'bad' MoCap data were designed, resulting in uncommon avatar visualisations. We propose an additional 're-visualisation' module in our motion capture pipeline and avatar staging approach, which enables choreographers and digital artists to rapidly prototype their ideas in a mixed reality performance environment. Finally, we discuss how our extended MoCap pipeline and avatar staging set-up can support artists and researchers who aim at a flexible and adaptive workflow in real-time motion visualization.