Joseph Paradiso, Eric Hu, Kai-yuh Hsiao

Abstract

As a bridge between our interest in Wearable Computer systems and new performance interfaces for digital music, we have built a highly instrumented pair of sneakers for interactive dance. These shoes each measure 16 different, continuous parameters expressed by each foot and are able to transmit them wirelessly to a base station placed well over 30 meters away, updating all values up to 60 times per second. This paper describes our system, illustrates its performance, and outlines a few musical mappings that we have created for demonstrations in computer-augmented dance.