Imagined Odyssey

A MIXED REALITY FIRST

When CWRU Professor of Dance Gary Galbraith saw Mark Griswold first demonstrating the Microsoft HoloLens holographic headset on stage at Microsoft’s BUILD conference in 2015, he immediately began imagining holograms mixed with live dance performance.

Integrating technology with dance has been a hallmark of Galbraith’s career, with many of his works enhanced by projection mapping, motion-detecting hardware, and synchronous, virtual collaborative dance performances across multiple cities.

Galbraith contacted the IC to explore a collaboration. By 2016, the IC had created a custom app to allow Galbraith to lay out holographic set pieces on a real-world stage. Galbraith’s mixed reality vision, Imagined Odyssey, debuted in November 2017 across twelve performances for audiences of 85 people wearing HoloLens. These were the largest shared-group HoloLens experiences in the world.

Fundamental code from this app for the arts later contributed to a brain tractography mapping app in collaboration with Cameron McIntyre, a project that would go on to attract $2.5M in NIH support.