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Dancing Robots Help Preserve Japanese Culture

Posted by timothy on from the pickling-is-a-form-of-preservation dept.

Neil Halelamien writes "As reported on robots.net and other sources, researchers at Tokyo have used the HRP-2 Promet humanoid robot to help preserve moves from ancient Japanese dance for future generations. The researchers used motion capture to record the movements of a dancing master, then encoded and replayed them on the robot. The HRP-2 Promet robots are themselves quite interesting, capable of standing up after lying down and non-autonomously operating a backhoe. The external appearance was created by a designer known for his work on several anime series."

17 of 244 comments (clear)

  1. A little unnecessary? by KinkifyTheNation · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Couldn't they just record the moves for now and use whatever robots the "future generation" has?

    1. Re:A little unnecessary? by yiantsbro · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why not just keep teaching the young? It doesn't matter that they don't want to (the young)--I know there are millions of young girls in America that are forced by over zealous parents into dance class.

    2. Re:A little unnecessary? by PhilHibbs · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I think a more accurate description would be that they have used motion-capture to preserve the dance movements, and used a robot to demonstrate that the data can be translated back into real-world movements. I'd me interested to know at what stage the inverse kinematics are calculated - at mo-cap stage, or at performance? I'd imagine it would have to be the latter, since different robots with different characteristics would have to behave differently to perform the same movements.

  2. Sick... by teutonic_leech · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Okay, IDNRTFA - but the sheer idea of something like this is a testimony of where we are heading on this planet. A dance is a cultural heritage that should be preserved by human beings, not by robots, otherwise it loses its meaning. If nothing else - the thought of 'dancing robots' really freaks me out - and I'm definitely not a Luddite - just something sick about this...

    1. Re:Sick... by DrMrLordX · · Score: 2, Insightful

      How is it sickening?

      Stop and think about what you're saying. Do you mean to say that you are offended by robots encroaching upon human culture? Why would that be?

      Hundreds, if not thousands of visionaries, sci-fi authors, and movie producers have already speculated about what our future society might be like were it populated by numerous robots and other sophisticated devices possessed of AI. Many have theorized that the robots would rebel against us, while others have portrayed a future in which humans and robots/AIs can co-exist.

      If we use robots as nothing more than tools, then, perhaps, intelligent robots might eventually see humanity as a threat or an impediment to their primary function. However, if we incorporate robots into our daily living, our culture, and our cultural development, they might see themselves as an integral part of society and opt to co-exist peacefully.

      Which would you prefer?

    2. Re:Sick... by servognome · · Score: 4, Insightful

      To record the moves to be replayed verbatim over and over is insulting to say the least, and verging on the point of disgusting. It certainly isn't right.
      Do you think it's wrong that we record music? I mean we record the sounds and play them over and over, never changing. Saying "robots should never dance" is pretty short-sighted. It could be used for a number of historical purposes. Throw the 'bot in a box for 200 years, and compare his moves to what is being done at the time. Society collapses, and styles are lost, the robot could be an important point of study and revive a dead style.
      From a tech standpoint the robots could also be used to improve AI, so that robots can mimic (or even develop depending on your philosophical view), minor variances based on "feelings" when performing something artistic.

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    3. Re:Sick... by tuxter · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Video captures human emotion, facial expressions, life. A robot will get no where near the scope of movement a human would.... The point I am making is it's not expressive.

    4. Re:Sick... by servognome · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Music is auditory, and recording it is very different to emulating it.
      I don't think music is different from art or music. It is created from human expression just the same, only the medium is different. When you talk about emulation that is what your player does, it emulates the music the musician created. An MP3 not an exact replica (encoding loses data), and moreover, it's recorded in a special room and manipulated by all sorts of machines to sound good (see Ashlee Simpson).
      The robot is a recording device, same as a camera, but it functions in 3-dimensions, you can walk around it, you can see things that may be hidden from a camera. Perhaps your objection is that the robot is limited such that it may not have the resolution to capture everything important. Maybe facial expressions are lost, or its incapable to capture an exact postion. I would agree with that. But, as a tool I think a robot is valuable and over time improvements could make it so that what it loses could be comparable to the differences between a live concert performance and a CD.

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    5. Re:Sick... by Orinthe · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So, I didn't RTFA either, but I did see it on the news (in Japan) a couple days ago.

      Anyway, what I saw was the traditional dance being performed in concert by both robots and traditionally-dressed Japanese women. Neither I, nor any of my American friends, nor any of my Japanese friends, found this at all "sick". Why do you?

      Why should technology be devoid of culture? If we choose to reflect our culture in our technology, as is very much the norm in Japan in my experience, does this not simply add to the worth of technology rather than subtracting from the inherent value of culture?

      Maybe you should think a little bit about why you believe there is a hard line between technology and culture--there is nothing inherent to "technology", however you define it, that makes it unable to have cultural value.

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    6. Re:Sick... by willpall · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Your post was well thought out until In short, I call typical American xenophobia.

      I read and reread the parent post and could not find a xenophobic statement up there. Just an understandable feeling of uneasiness about a human artform being preserved by robots. Although I do agree with you that it's better than having that artform completely lost, I still fail to see where xenophobia enters the picture. I call typical American-bashing :-)

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    7. Re:Sick... by argStyopa · · Score: 2, Insightful

      No, I'd say it's asking : what's the point?
      I mean, to say "look, we've preserved this dance! w00t!" does what, exactly?

      Cultural actions out of context are worth what, exactly? If nobody's learning the dance as part of their culture, and if the only preservation of it is some dusty electronic file stored on a dvd somewhere, it's lost its context. It's lost anything that gave it an inherent value. You've preserved the empty, now-meaningless gestures.

      Take someone from an inuit culture, and have a human perform a dance learned from a pygmy tribe. What is he/she going to get out of it?

      There may be some sort of trivia archaeo-ethnic-historical value in preserving this stuff (like knowing that 17th Century people switched their shoes from left to right every day), but I fear that people think that this might be a way to 'preserve' a culture that's disappearing under our homogenized pan-Terran media world. It's not. Like a dead language preserved only in a dictionary, a dance saved by memorized motion capture is like a verb without a noun: empty of meaning.

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  3. Culture evolves by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Culture is meant to evolve, that's how it became culture in the first place - it was grown from simple roots into what it is now.

    By getting a robot to keep doing the same dance moves over and over again you effectively halt the evolution of the culture. The culture will now stagnate.

    1. Re:Culture evolves by databyss · · Score: 1, Insightful

      I disagree. How does technology storing cultural aspects stagnate culture growth? Have books stalled out change?

      I think that by allowing technology to store a snapshot of culture, it'll provide future people an interesting look back.

      I think that todays society would love to see cultural aspects from a couple hundred years ago. What makes you think that future society wouldn't want to see how we are today?

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  4. motion capture probably not enough by KingArthur10 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    To me, it seems like motion capture is not quite enough. To truely record a dance, you'd need multiple angle video capture, along with motion capture, and save it in a raw format on several servers, so that in the future, you don't have the dance altering, as too little movement was actually captured by our young, and very primative robots. The more raw data collected, the more accurate the dance will be for comming generations. Several capture techniques should be used in any such preservation.

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  5. no gap there by Tablizer · · Score: 2, Insightful

    And us Americans like to think we are more creative. That is the most creative excuse for funding I have heard in a looooong time. We are slipping.

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  6. Re:Dancing robots by Wwolmack · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is the funniest thing i have read on Slashdot in over a year.

    And as an Asian who is somewhat involved in Japanese cultural presentations, I find it hilarious.

  7. DVDs, Movies? by logicnazi · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Alright you want to make a robot that does a traditional dance. Fine I guess that has an appeal but don't pretend it is to preserve japanese culture, unless that is the culture of making crazy electronic gadgets. After all DVDs and Movies of *people* are alot easier to imitate than dancing robots.

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