Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM) has played an active role in cultivating creative and research environments to support the art & technology of the next generation. Since 2011, we have carried out “Reactor for Awareness in Motion (RAM)”, a research project for developing tool for dance creation and education, with Yoko Ando, a dancer from The Forsythe Company, a leading contemporary dance company and programmers from Japan and the US. Professionals in dance and technology shared an innovative concept in dance and developed it in the form of a physical tool and workshop. It is a revolutionary project in the sense that the technology is not only for theatrical effect, but also to embody one of the very natures of dance and communicate it with the world. What we witness is a technological inquiry into the nature of dance. Customized based on the perspectives of the dancer, the digital tool writes a new chapter in the history of experience in dance and technology.

	RAM Dance Toolkit is a C++ creative coding toolkit to create environments for dancers. This toolkit contains a GUI and functions to access, recognize, and process motion data to support creation of various environmental conditions (called “scene”) and gives real time feedbacks to dancers using code in an easy way.
	MOTIONER is the inertial motion capture system developed for RAM. The computer captures the dancer’s movements via 18 sensors attached to the dancer’s body. In general, motion capture systems are very expensive and very accurate, or very cheap and very inaccurate. To address this problem we designed one which is relatively low in cost and fairly accurate.

RAM and MOTIONER are licensed under Creative Common and can be downloaded from this page.