An AHRC project, led by Kirk as principal investigator with partners at Sussex, King’s College London and Bedford, that used motion capture to study how people moved through Iron Age places. It produced papers at ISEA 2011, CAA and EVA, a chapter for Springer, and the Motions in Place augmented-reality dance installation for Brighton’s White Nights in 2011.
Motion in Place Platform (MiPP) was funded by the AHRC under its Digital Equipment and Database Enhancement for Impact (DEDEFI) scheme (AH/H037675/1). It was based in the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex, with Kirk Woolford as principal investigator. The Gateway to Research record gives the funded period as March 2010 to August 2011.
Archaeologists and anthropologists often study how people moved through places, but their usual recording tools, such as cameras and GPS loggers, capture objects and locations rather than the experience of being in a space. Architecture, performance and heritage studies were turning towards movement and embodied experience in the same way.
MiPP set out to build a platform of hardware and software for capturing movement on real sites. It worked at two scales: positional data from many people over long periods, and detailed full-body motion capture of two people in a small area over shorter sessions. The team also built tools and test projects to show how the data could be shared and used, including virtual reconstructions, linking the movements of excavation teams to finds, augmented reality on site, and creative performance.
The project built on earlier Technology Strategy Board research with Animazoo, the Brighton motion capture company, and involved a professional dance group and an advisory team. Its intended users ranged across anthropology, archaeology, architecture, geography, heritage science, computer science and the performing and visual arts, with wider uses at heritage sites, in urban settings and visitor attractions, and in outdoor sports research.
Engagement plans included a scoping workshop in Sussex, four sample projects published in print and online, and a closing open workshop for researchers and non-academic users.
Source: UKRI Gateway to Research, grant AH/H037675/1. Kirk Woolford on Gateway to Research
