| dc.description.abstract | How can virtual reality be used to advance modern dance education methods? As a rapidly evolving technology, virtual reality has the potential to be developed for many different educational purposes. Previous research has shown that using motion tracking and virtual reality to learn dancing is plausible (Chan 2011), however the programs previously developed are lacking in user interaction and learning advancements. Our project builds upon these fundamentals. We captured dance movements from a couple of dancers and incorporated the capture data to a virtual dance avatar’s movements. Students can learn about key dance movements by viewing and interacting with the avatar’s dance movements in the virtual reality environment. The user will be able to observe the dance movement at any point in the routine, with the ability to slow down the dance in order to observe certain movements at a more comprehensible speed. In the future, we would like this application will provide two views of the dance avatar; one as the physical character, the other as an anatomical model of the character’s musculoskeletal system. Therefore students can learn detailed muscle movements when the avatar dances. We will include three movements specifically the Arabesque, Second port de bras, and Retire from modern dance compositions, in the VR application. We chose these performances because of the common issues with misalignment of the body in these movements and the complex muscle/bone systems at play. Often students have difficulties performing or maintaining these positions correctly because of several reasons: muscular weakness, inability to identify and engage the correct muscle groups, and structural abnormalities. This virtual reality program will allow the user to observe a 3D avatar performing a dance within the virtual world-space. The user will have different interactions they can perform in the program, such as visual feedback preferences for the avatar that will allow them to understand the dance in a more enhanced environment, as well as learn at their own pace. This will allow for greater user interactions, such as being able to rotate and view the performing avatar from different angles within a 3D world-space, along with the ability to playback the virtual performance and observe the dance at different rates of speed. Creating the ability to perform these interactions in virtual reality will allow us to add additional user interactions in the future, like virtual tutor feedback and visual correction feedback as previous projects have done. In addition to these interactions, our program will take user inputs from a virtual reality headset and trackers, such as those from HTC for their VIVE headset (HTC Vive and Vive Pro Helmets). The VIVE has the flexibility of having programmable user body trackers, which are much more affordable than a full-body motion capture suit. Furthermore, the ability to change the amount of body trackers used allows for the flexibility of adjusting tracking precision, based on usability and ease of evaluation. With this advancement of technology available for research purposes, as well as demonstration of previous successful techniques, the resources are available for the creation of a user-friendly, virtual reality-based modern dance education program. | |
