Automatic Sign Dance Synthesis from Gesture-based Sign Language

Automatic dance synthesis has become more and more popular due to the increasing demand in computer games and animations. Existing research generates dance motions without much consideration for the context of the music. In reality, professional dancers make choreography according to the lyrics and music features. In this research, we focus on a particular genre of dance known as sign dance, which combines gesture-based sign language with full body dance motion. We propose a system to automatically generate sign dance from a piece of music and its corresponding sign gesture. The core of the system is a Sign Dance Model trained by multiple regression analysis to represent the correlations between sign dance and sign gesture/music, as well as a set of objective functions to evaluate the quality of the sign dance. Our system can be applied to music visualization, allowing people with hearing difficulties to understand and enjoy music

Spatial Motion Doodles: Sketching Animation in VR Using Hand Gestures and Laban Motion Analysis

International audienceWe present a method for easily drafting expressive character animation by playing with instrumented rigid objects. We parse the input 6D trajectories (position and orientation over time)-called spatial motion doodles-into sequences of actions and convert them into detailed character animations using a dataset of parameterized motion clips which are automatically fitted to the doodles in terms of global trajectory and timing. Moreover, we capture the expres-siveness of user-manipulation by analyzing Laban effort qualities in the input spatial motion doodles and transferring them to the synthetic motions we generate. We validate the ease of use of our system and the expressiveness of the resulting animations through a series of user studies, showing the interest of our approach for interactive digital storytelling applications dedicated to children and non-expert users, as well as for providing fast drafting tools for animators