Litefoot is a collaborative project between the The Interaction Design Centre (IDC), and The Centre for Computational Musicology and Computer Music (CCMCM), which are research centres within The Department of CSIS, at the University of Limerick. The project's aim was to develop a floor-space to research the development of immersive and collaborative environments in creative virtual contexts. The project's user group currently comprises the The Irish World Music Center (IWMC).

The development of virtual reality over the last few years has been extremely rapid. One element of the developments of computer support for co-operative activity, has been to focus on interfaces that do not depend on traditional computer keyboards (or mice). In particular the search activity is concerned with how a performer or artist can directly control a computer, and which resources within the computer are controlled in the context of the artist's normal performance. A relatively unexplored area of control is that associated with movement. The current project has grown out of an informal collaboration between the IDC and CCMCM in conceiving and designing an "intelligent" dance floor that will allow a dancers steps to be tracked, stored, and represented in such a way as to facilitate a novel performance environment, a wired developmental play space for children and a therapeutic context for people with limited mobility. 

The project aims to further develop the user-centred, iterative inter-disciplinary design approach that is the hallmark of the IDC, and the CCMCM's commitment to developing and exploring new performance and compositional spaces. 

Concept: 

• Track impact of the feet of a dancer (or dancers)
• A floor space, 2 x 2 m with 40 mm resolution
• Record & Analyse Steps

or

• Control and/or interact with another medium

The LifeFoot prototype is a floor space, almost two by two meters square and about 10 centimetres high, filled with a matrix of optical proximity sensors. When a person (or an object) is on this area, the location of the contact points on the surface is detected. The weight, or impact force, of what ever is put on the floor is also monitored, and any event happening on the floor is sent to a PC connected to the LiteFoot floor. On the PC, the events can be processed in a number of ways. First of all, the events on the floor can generate a direct visual representation of what's going on, with for example location mapped as location and force as colour. The visual representation can be made transient or persistent. Alternatively, events on the floor space can be made to generate abstract representations of events (but still, of course, those representations have to be mapped in an arbitrary but meaningful way). The floor events can also, and simultaneously, be mapped to MIDI events and streams, which in turn will produce sounds.

Use scenarios

The LiteFoot interactive floor space can be used for many different kinds of performance, and one particular factor is its expected feature to make subtleties of movement visible and audible that otherwise might not be observed by the audience in front of a large stage. Also, the possibilities for the dancer to control and interact with other media makes it possible to extend the performance beyond traditional boundaries. 

In general, the LiteFoot floor space makes it possible to let motion and proximity to the floor space control images, lighting, sound and perhaps video. It is also possible to record motion patterns and for the users to interact with previously recorded patterns, i.e. through application of neural network technology, the device is user programmable through use.