Image – Motion.Lab

Created by Deakin Motion.Lab researcher Dr. John McCormick, PhD candidate Stephanie Andrews and researcher Dr. Jordan Beth Vincent, Duet is a Virtual Reality artwork that invites viewers to don a VR headset and engage in a movement interaction with an Artificially Intelligent entity.

“The AI entity incorporates machine learning and neural networks in its design,” says McCormick. “The AI agent is able to accumulate movement knowledge in a way that mimics human learning and transforms an interactive experience into a collaborative one.”  In other words, the AI entity learns from previous participants in terms of how to move and respond like a human, and allows a user to embark on a movement-based dialogue between participant and digital partner.

Duet incorporates virtual reality, full body motion capture, and the AI entity to explore concepts of embodied knowledge, shared movement poetics, and distortions of personal identity.

As Andrews describes, “both the human participant and the AI avatar become performers, spontaneously improvising with each other and exploring wordless communication.” 

Within the VR headest, Duet generates a visualization of the relationship between the user and the agent, exploring illusions of perceptual space through the use of minimal aesthetics, and offers a new perspective on how virtual reality might expand the possibilities of human-computer interaction.

Images – Motion.Lab