Category: Embodied Interfaces & Responsive Environments
Year: 2025-Present | Ongoing Series

Immersive projection-mapped yoga experience using real-time body tracking to create responsive dichroic landscapes. Explores how playful, responsive environments can deepen both individual mind-body connection and communal connection during shared embodied practice.

Research Question: Can ambient responsive environments support meditative states while fostering communal connection through playful interaction?

Technical Implementation:

• NVIDIA Body Tracking (25-point skeleton) for real-time pose detection

• Proximity-based interactions: movement activates flow emitters, sparkles, chakras

• Multi-participant tracking: practitioners see each other's movements visualized, creating shared visual landscape

• Voice-activated scene transitions for teacher control

• Audio reactivity: FFT analysis mapping sound bath frequencies to visuals

• Iterative development: breath rate detection via ribcage motion, ongoing heart rate integration

Key Innovation: Environmental co-regulation that's both individual and communal. Each person's movement contributes to shared visual experience, making individual practice visible to the group. Playful visual feedback—sparkles, flowing particles, blooming chakras—transforms solo practice into collective creation.

Communal Connection: Rather than isolated practice, participants witness each other's movements through responsive visuals. When someone reaches arms overhead, the whole group sees celestial effects; when the group moves together, visual synchronicity emerges. Creates nonverbal connection and shared presence without disrupting meditative focus.

Mind-Body Connection Through Play: Responsive feedback makes embodied experience visible. Practitioners discover: "My breath changes the landscape," "My movement creates beauty," "We're creating this together." Play invites curiosity about internal states—what happens if I move differently? How does my energy affect the space or merge with others?

Contribution to RNI Research: Explores how physical spaces can actively support cognitive/emotional states through both individual feedback and communal resonance. Demonstrates continuous monitoring in natural settings that enhances rather than interrupts practice. Foundation for RAI's environmental control component—shows technology can support healing without isolation.

Technologies: TouchDesigner, NVIDIA Body Tracking, 4K projection, FFT audio analysis