THE SENSORIUM PROJECT

Sensorium is a research-creation project that turns the dancing body into both stage and laboratory. Wearable soft robotics, fluidic sensors, and haptic feedback systems are woven into choreographic practice so that touch, pressure, and tremor become shared language between human movers and computational systems.

The project asks how technology can feel with dancers rather than only watching or quantifying them—and how these new forms of sensation can reshape the way we move, care, and design for human bodies.

Sensorium explores how wearable robotics and haptic feedback can extend the sensing capacity of the dancing body. The work combines soft, air-filled microchannels embedded in elastomeric sleeves that register pressure and deformation; haptic feedback patterns that return information to the performer through vibration and touch; and choreographic systems that treat these devices as responsive partners rather than props.

In the Sensorium environment, the dancer is not only performing—the body is also measuring, translating, and negotiating information in real time. The stage becomes a live interface where human perception, machine sensing, and choreographic imagination are in constant conversation.

Sensorium uses soft, modular devices that attach to the body in different configurations. The primary instrument is a fluidic sleeve developed in collaboration with Dr. Lillian Chin's engineering lab at UT Austin. Air-filled microchannels embedded in elastomeric material register deformation through internal pressure shifts.

For dance, this approach offers specific advantages:

Sensorium emerges from a set of interlocking concerns: that dance knowledge is often treated as ephemeral and difficult to preserve; that performance technology tends to privilege visuality over other senses; and that wearable computing rarely learns from choreographic intelligence about timing, weight, contact, and attention.

The project proposes that designing with dancers—not just for them—produces instruments that understand touch differently, and that this understanding has implications beyond the stage: for rehabilitation, for care work, for how machines come to know bodies at all.

Me Duniya is the inaugural performance work developed through the Sensorium research framework. The piece explores soft robotics and fluidic/haptic sensing in dance performance, testing how the ACCS system can create meaningful dialogue between performer sensation and spatial/visual response.

The work premiered in 2025 and continues to evolve as the sensing technology and choreographic vocabulary develop in tandem.