Backup Dancers

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  5 dancers in pyramid formation

Inspiration

As a dancer, choreographing and blocking can be hard when you're by yourself. It can be difficult to visualize what different formations might look like. Therefore, I decided to create the Backup Dancers lens to help dancers visualize what their choreography could look like in different formations.

What it does

The Backup Dancers lens illustrates what different formations with different numbers of dancers may look like. The user can choose to have one to four backup dancers and choose between three common formations (pyramid, horizontal line, vertical line).

How I built it

I used body segmentation to create the backup dancers. By adding interaction events and scripts to Text and Images, I was able to create the buttons that users select to choose the number of dancers and the formation.

Challenges I ran into

A feature that I originally wanted to include was a slider that would control the time offset between the backup dancers. This way, the user could simulate a "wave" effect with their backup dancers, where the backup dancers follow the user with increasing lag times as they go farther back. However, I could not figure out how to display camera input with a time offset (camera input "from the past" ). If anyone has any tips or advice, please reach out!

What I learned

This was my first time experimenting with Lens Studio, so I learned a lot throughout the course of creating this lens! I learned how to apply body segmentation, create buttons, attach scripts to those buttons, and leverage different cameras so that the UI features can be visible while filming the video, but disappear in the final product.

What's next for Backup Dancers

Not only do I want to add a time-offset slider so users can experiment with wave effects, but I'd also like to add more options for formations, like a "windows" formation. Moreover, the perspective could be more developed to be more accurate from different viewpoints. Lastly, I could account for the environment, and place backup dancers behind obstacles that may be in the way.

Built With

• javascript