Capturing Human Movement in the Wild

This paper builds on current calls in HCI to conduct experiments outside laboratory environments or 'in the wild'. The paper presents an overview of debates in ecology and wilderness studies to explain the need for wild research environments to be both free and natural. The paper then presents a history of movement capture in the wild and introduces the Motion in Place Platform (MiPP) project, a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project investigating the use of motion capture techniques outside of research labs and presents two case studies of research conducted through the MiPP project focusing on the influence of the 'wild' environment the research was conducted in. The first case study examines methods of measuring the effect of the environment on the experiment. The second case study examines affordances of 'wild' environments, which were not anticipated by the experiment's designers.