Groove Cube

I worked on this product with a great group in Critical Practices. We started by observing a hip hop dance team on campus. We interviewed the dancers about their experience on the team, and what they found out what important.

We struggled with coming up with an idea for an object we could make for them, but my group was struggling to come up with a cool idea that we felt was in our technical capabilities. But I pushed forward to try to design something that would incorporate: 1 a Raspberry Pi, because I was learning python at the time, 2. used a camera, because I like camera.

I conceived an idea of a virtual dance circle. One that would allow the dancers to share an object between themselves. They could record their moves, and pass the object along at their convenience. I thought it was quite beautiful that this physical dance circle, that they did weekly at their practice, could extend in virtual space where it could be an endless dance.

Our groove cube would end up being a little box that could record clips and generate an exquisite corpse music video. The video would then be pushed on to Youtube. I worked on the software that controlled the camera, joined the videos and music, and lastly upload it. It was a little hairy getting everything working.

Tools: Raspberry Pi, Python, FFMPEG