Full Body Dance Dance Revolution

tasty_beanburger writes "NewScientistTech has a story about a full body version of Dance Dance Revolution. It uses vision recognition to award points after assessing a player's ability to correctly mimic silhouetted dance shapes. Check out the video clip of it being demoed at SIGGRAPH 2006."

Comments

Re:Translate Sign Language

[The Living Fractal]

Hey now, DDD has some practical use. A video game that actually involves burning calories is probably just what the US needs, and more of it. Though your original point is well taken.

TLF

Re:But I still need to pay rent!

[RobertB-DC]

Seems like a lot of work for something that isn't that novel. I sense that a DDR with additional EyeToy functionality would be just as good, and I already *have* most everything for that.

Indeed. Both DDR Extreme (and its sequel, DDR Extreme 2) have EyeToy support and include a "Hands and Feet" mode. You're supposed to supplement the foot movement with left and right hand movement. It doesn't give the whole-body positioning that the article discusses, which is a *good* thing.

Konami's simplified method of adding upper-body "dancing" gives you more flexibility to come up with a "routine" of your own. The article's suggestion of a system that requires you to put your body in a precise position is pretty goofy by comparison. It would be like a version of DDR that requires you to use a particular foot to hit a pad -- sacrificing gameplay flexibility for an "enhanced workout".

Plus, the manual for DDR Extreme 2 (which I just bought for my teenage daughters and my long-past-teenage self) suggests only that the background be contrasting, without a lot of motion. No requirement that it be white and illuminated. I guess Konami figured out how to do motion detection in the real world after all.

You know, there's a good argument here that university research types ought to spend more time in the freshman dorms before they announce their "new" discoveries, especially if they're based on a popular video game.