14 DAY TRIAL // Just because we've been hearing mostly about smartwatches and fitness bands these days, it doesn't mean the wearable ecosystem is limited to these gadgets.
There are plenty of impressive concoctions you can “wear” around like that scooter you could actually double as a belt.
The next story we’re going tell you about involves an incursion into the world of art.
What if you could paint with your feet?
E-trace is a wearable tech meets performative dance project by Lesia Trubat González that has a lot of potential.
What the creator of the project has done is attach sensors on thin ballet shoes that can convert movements into visual strokes, thus bringing two worlds of artistic expression together – dancing and digital painting (as seen at Cargo Collective).
The overall idea seems to have been derived from synesthesia. This is a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory of cognitive pathway.
We are referring to Chromesthesia, in particular, in which people often associate sounds with colors. For some, everyday sounds such as doors opening or TV buzzing in the background trigger certain colors. For others, colors are triggered when musical notes or keys are being played.
This is what happens in González’s project as ballerinas carried away by the sound of music also leave visual, colorful trails of their dancing pattern.
The dancing shoes use sensors to make dancing colorful
Electronic Traces is actually a set of ballerina shoes that use Lilypad Arduinos to record pressure and movement whenever the dancer’s feet touch the ground. The information is then carried off and relied to a nearby smartphone for interpretation.
After recording the session, the data can be visualized on the accompanying app, allowing dancers to review the performance or just compare it to previous ones.
Performers can go ahead and extract several scenes and even print them. So this technology could allow dancers to compare their movements with other dancers’ via graphs.
Lesia Trubat González has graduated from Barcelona’s prestigious ELISAVA design school and she has high hopes for Electronic Traces. She believes these atypical dancing shoes will provide novel ways of teaching dance disciplines.
Furthermore, they could provide an extra level of artistic interpretation on top of the visual dancing experience, making the dancing session a rich medium for expression.
As you will be able to see in the video embedded bellow, the Arduino-based E-Traces is a way of creating elegant marks on music, which brings back calligraphy vibes.
For the time being, we don’t know whether these shoes will actually make it into real life as a product or how much they will cost, but we’ll keep you posted if that information arises.
