Interaction Between Spectator and Virtual Actor Through Movement: From Child Gestures to Interactive Digital Creation

This article is based on the CIGALE project, an interdisciplinary research between digital art, linguistics, and theater on motion capture and interaction with artistic, co-speech and expressive gestures. The aim of this project is to explore an interactive gestural dialogue between spectator and virtual actor. We will explain how our artistic modalities deal with space, time, and movement in a particular way to achieve our specific artistic goal: to encourage the emergence of a gestural interaction between human and virtual actors, thus giving the feeling of a “living” dialogue opening on an aesthetics of improvisation. First, we will describe the design and development process of InterACTE, an artistic installation for improvised gestural interaction between a spectator and a digital partner (virtual actor). Then, from seven recorded videos of interactions between the virtual actor and the spectator, we will present the interdisciplinary study we conducted with an artistic approach, and a linguistic approach.