Visualising energy waves
If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to see the invisible microscopic world around us, look at Hidden Fields. This performance dance event uses 3D cameras and innovative spectroscopy computer software – enabling the dancers to interact with the billions of atoms that travel around us – to create a colourful and spellbinding multi-sensory experience.

Dr Glowacki at the University of Bristol’s Centre for Computational Chemistry, has been collaborating with dancers and musicians on this interactive dance experiment. His expertise as a theoretical chemist meant he could use his knowledge of molecular behaviour to address the challenge of interpreting the atomic vibrations, created by motion, into a multi-sensory experience.

He developed the spectroscopy software that converts the dancers’ movements as they are captured on camera, into energy fields to create sounds and images. The computer software is linked to five projectors, resulting in people’s real-time energy fields being projected in a 360° kaleidoscope of light and colour onto the surrounding walls.

Energy avatar
‘When you go in the space you will see 3D cameras,’ explains Glowacki, ‘which capture your motion in real time. The motion is interpreted as waves on an invisible sea of energy, using our custom-built software. Once people’s energy waves are interpreted, they can interact with these atomic particles. As people move in the space, they can manipulate the motion of these particles in real time and then our software analyses this energy avatar.’ This information is converted into a visual projection of all the virtual energy particles and the sounds that can be heard are an interpretation of the actual vibrations caused by the dancers’ motion. As the vibrations are captured, a musician can apply sounds to them to create the soundscape.