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Dancing Robots Help Preserve Japanese Culture
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."
Tell that to the Okinawans; as young people, especially girls, leave the prefecture, they are having a harder and harder time finding people to learn traditional Okinawan dances. Is it better for the dance to be completely lost than for a robot to do it? Surely someone can learn it from the robot, but if its gone, its gone.
I'm sure a lot of people said the same thing when television could bring theatre into the home. A play on TV isn't real theatre, it loses its meaning.
Furthermore, it seems to me that you seem to think that the Japanese are all going to teach their robots to dance and they won't have to bother. That seems pretty unlikely. This is obviously another step in getting functioning robots, not a government program to make dancing machines. In short, I call typical American xenophobia.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
Reading this article gave me an idea:
I'm an avid swing dancer. In order to effectively learn new moves, I either have to see a video or have somebody teach me. With the video, I can replay it as many times as I want, but I only get one 2D angle. With a teacher I can appreciate the full 3D movement, but if I try to get them to replay too many times they get annoyed and smack me.
There's things like the Jiveoholic Dance Step Database, which is useful by limited to 2D.
Perhaps motion capture could be the best of both worlds? I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to capture the moves of expert swing dancers, and then have a piece of software to replay their movements in 3D. A user of the software could replay moves to their heart's content, switching to arbitrary angles. If robots like the HRP-2 ever become cheap and flexible enough, such motion capture could even be used to replay moves on the bots.
Some folks at MIT made a very rudimentary "swing dancing" robot arm, which provides swing dance leads. I wonder how long it'll be until we see humanoid robots capable of leading, or maybe even interpreting hand signals from a human and being capable of following.