HOW I BECAME KINECTED

How did I became insterested in Kinesthetic Learning and gesture recognition technologies?
It is a bit of a long story...
Since the beginning of my undergraduate program at UC, San Diego I developed a great interest in gesture recognition technology. Body movements seems to me like the most natural, liberatory, and novel approach to human-computer interaction. My interest lead me to installation art that uses the Microsoft Kinect to disrupt viewer's passivity in a gallery space. Participants in this kind of art form engage in a unique interaction, which thinking about it critically, it can be consider a performance in where the stage is set up for the user to embody. I encountered very interesting and worth-exploring arena of concepts using this technology during my years in the Interdisciplinary in the Computing and the Arts Major (ICAM).

It was quite a challenge to learn how to program the Microsoft Kinect. I was not an experienced
programmer and it took me a lot of hours and many days at a computer lab to create the most simple of compositions using Processing; a software based in the Java programming language. When I finally was able to create a very primitive installation, my online community of artists recommended me to try Quartz composer and the recently released Triplex Toolkit. I think this has been one of the best resources I have ever discovered in my career. I was very familiar with Quartz composer which is a very powerful visual programming environment and the Triplex's patches allowed many, many possibilities without the need to program every single step.

Ruiz Michelle, Entry Denied 2012, Installation.

Instituto de Cultura y Arte. (Image modified to cover nudity) 

I developed various compositions but one that achieved an interesting level of complexity is Entry Denied. The installation deals with representations of female violence in the borderlands. I mounted the installation at my exhibition "Entries" at UC San Diego Annex Gallery and during the 4th Binational exhibition of Border Issues.
I provided context to the piece, observed how participants interacted and had conversations about their experience. Through these means, it was clear to me that embodied interaction has great potential to engage users.

Compared to other traditional forms of art, instead of passively observing a composition (e.g. video, painting, photography) the viewer obtains an additional level of understanding through movement.  The participants of my installation expressed that they were impressed by how certain gestures and movements when performed leads to a particular idea or emotion. They considered that this integrated experience of image, body and sound lead them to find new meanings in the context of gender violence, which is exactly what I was aiming for in this project. From these conversations and observations, I could say that users "learned" about the societal position of the female of color in the United States and Mexico.  To see the installation in action, see a short documentation of the exhibition here. (be aware that it might not appropriate for young students since there is partial nudity)

Shift in Focus and where I am heading
My journey experimenting with this technology is not ending here. This project among with other interactive installations, exposed me to the grand potential of gesture recognition. Lately, I have not taken the task of creating an art project because my job and current masters program has shift my focus into education. At my job, when creating educational material for the classroom, I often ask myself how to "engage" students into viewing a particular lesson. Now, after recently learning about it, a "multimodal" approach or finding "kinesthetic" experiences. I have experimented with various editing techniques and ways of exposing the materials like asking the students to "stand up" in the middle of the lecture and "repeat after me" or "move your [blank]" etc.

Sample of how students can perform gestures during a lesson video. Images are subject to Copyright. 

At my classes in my masters program I am also inquiring how online education can become more engaging for students. We have had discussions about the drawbacks and benefits of e-learning, which often touches issues of lacking personal real-life interactions such a face to face conversations. For example, Second Life, although a very useful environment, it still deals with avatars and a level of anonymity. I think in these areas and many others in the field of education, the Microsoft Kinect can be a very useful and powerful technology. I will like to explore the current emerging applications, software, and experiments with this device in the classroom and online education. I will share them for teachers who might find them as useful resources or simple to spark the interest. I welcome educators who will like to explore how this device is relevant to your classroom and how it can enhance student's learning. In other words, why should we getting our virtual and real classrooms"Kinected".

The following video is a great is a great starting point to begin thinking about the possibilities of using the Kinect in the classroom: