Embers: Hybrid Dragon Staff Performance

Originally performed live on May 16th, 2022 at Kellen Auditorium and set up as an interactive installation on May 17th, 2022 for the Parsons Design & Technology 2022 Thesis show. Embers has since been at Transformus 2022, I Feel Summer Escape 2022, and the NYC’s official Burning Man Decompression Party 2022.

Embers is a fusion of fire spinning, XR, and audio visual performance designed to complement and augment the performer in an awe inspiring immersive experience. Created with Unity3D, TouchDesigner, Chataigne, and TouchOSC.

Inspired by my fire spinning practice and originally created for my masters thesis, Embers is the beginning of an XR VJ experience built for flow artists. A SteamVR tracker is attached to the end of the staff, allowing my staff to communicate with my computer and drive simulated fire visual effects in a virtual world and the LEDs on the staff itself. Many visual parameters are controlled via TouchOSC from a mobile device so that a lighting designer can also control the visual look of the performance while I focus on creating an engaging physical performance. It has been setup both as an XR stage for performers during dance parties and as interactive installation open for anyone to play with!

The world environment was created entirely with Unity terrain tools, MTree plugin for dynamic vegetation, and a skybox from the Unity Asset Store. Lighting design and lightmap baking was done by me, and all visual effects are either custom made or modified by me. The project currently uses Open XR framework with a custom script from a user on the official Unity forum that enables Vive Tracker support, but uses Valves OpenVR plugin as a fallback. It also uses a number of packages created by creative coder Keijiro Takahashi, who’s work was a major inspiration for both the inception and creative drive to make this happen, for audio reactivity, OSC input, and spout video streaming.

When it comes to the external control side of things, the progam Chataigne handles all of the routing of OSC communications between TouchOSC, TouchDesigner, Unity, and the FlowToys Connect Bridge. Ben Kupper’s OSCQuerry plugin surfaces compatible Unity game objects and components to a server in Chataigne to allow for easier mapping of input values and messages to their outputs in Unity, while the FlowToys Connect Bridge plugin allows me to send messages from Chataigne to the FlowToys LED capsules on the dragon staff. I give a huge thanks to both Ben Kuper and Manuel Mitasch who were incredibly helpful walking me through issues I had with Chataigne, OSCQuerry in Unity, TouchOSC, and the Flowtoys Connect Bridge.

Further development will see me expanding on the visual effects and creating different worlds + aesthetics, creating new hardware in the staff, experimenting with recreating the experience in Unreal Engine and TouchDesigner, learning how to control stage lights over DMX, incorporating motion capture data, expanding to new props, and building out a multiplayer VR and AR versions.

In addition to experimenting with and developing my hybrid dragon staff, I also began deepening my practice through dragon staff fire spinning. It is my desire to have this project be able to unite physical fire spinning with interactive digital aspects of my practice. For now though I continue to practice with fire somewhat separately at Liminal Space NYC, the only permitted fire spinning in NYC, am in the process of my getting my FDNY fire performer certification.