Dance-the-music : an educational platform for the modeling, recognition and audiovisual monitoring of dance steps using spatiotemporal motion templates

In this article, a computational platform is presented, entitled “Dance-the-Music”, that can be used in a dance educational context to explore and learn the basics of dance steps. By introducing a method based on spatiotemporal motion templates, the platform facilitates to train basic step models from sequentially repeated dance figures performed by a dance teacher. Movements are captured with an optical motion capture system. The teachers’ models can be visualized from a first-person perspective to instruct students how to perform the specific dance steps in the correct manner. Moreover, recognition algorithms-based on a template matching method can determine the quality of a student’s performance in real time by means of multimodal monitoring techniques. The results of an evaluation study suggest that the Dance-the-Music is effective in helping dance students to master the basics of dance figures

Scalable Dense Monocular Surface Reconstruction

This paper reports on a novel template-free monocular non-rigid surface reconstruction approach. Existing techniques using motion and deformation cues rely on multiple prior assumptions, are often computationally expensive and do not perform equally well across the variety of data sets. In contrast, the proposed Scalable Monocular Surface Reconstruction (SMSR) combines strengths of several algorithms, i.e., it is scalable with the number of points, can handle sparse and dense settings as well as different types of motions and deformations. We estimate camera pose by singular value thresholding and proximal gradient. Our formulation adopts alternating direction method of multipliers which converges in linear time for large point track matrices. In the proposed SMSR, trajectory space constraints are integrated by smoothing of the measurement matrix. In the extensive experiments, SMSR is demonstrated to consistently achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on a wide variety of data sets.Comment: International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), Qingdao, China, October 201

Proceedings of the Salford Postgraduate Annual Research Conference (SPARC) 2011

These proceedings bring together a selection of papers from the 2011 Salford Postgraduate Annual Research Conference(SPARC). It includes papers from PhD students in the arts and social sciences, business, computing, science and engineering, education, environment, built environment and health sciences. Contributions from Salford researchers are published here alongside papers from students at the Universities of Anglia Ruskin, Birmingham City, Chester,De Montfort, Exeter, Leeds, Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores and Manchester

Designing for Ballet Classes: Identifying and Mitigating Communication Challenges Between Dancers and Teachers

Dancer-teacher communication in a ballet class can be challenging: ballet is one of the most complex forms of movements, and learning happens through multi-faceted interactions with studio tools (mirror, barre, and floor) and the teacher. We conducted an interview-based qualitative study with seven ballet teachers and six dancers followed by an open-coded analysis to explore the communication challenges that arise while teaching and learning in the ballet studio. We identified key communication issues, including adapting to multi-level dancer expertise, transmitting and realigning development goals, providing personalized corrections and feedback, maintaining the state of flow, and communicating how to properly use tools in the environment. We discuss design implications for crafting technological interventions aimed at mitigating these communication challenges

Embodied conversations: Performance and the design of a robotic dancing partner

This paper reports insights gained from an exploration of performance-based techniques to improve the design of relationships between people and responsive machines. It draws on the Emergent Objects project and specifically addresses notions of embodiment as employed in the field of performance as a means to prototype and develop a robotic agent, SpiderCrab, designed to promote expressive interaction of device and human dancer, in order to achieve ‘performative merging’. The significance of the work is to bring further knowledge of embodiment to bear on the development of human-technological interaction in general. In doing so, it draws on discursive and interpretive methods of research widely used in the field of performance but not yet obviously aligned with some orthodox paradigms and practices within design research. It also posits the design outcome as an ‘objectile’ in the sense that a continuous and potentially divergent iteration of prototypes is envisaged, rather than a singular final product. The focus on performative merging draws in notions of complexity and user experience. Keywords: Embodiment; Performance; Tacit Knowledge; Practice-As-Research; Habitus.</p