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

Translate Sign Language

[neonprimetime]

The researchers believe the system could have more practical applications in the future. They say it could be used to automatically translate sign language, for example

Yes, if this technology exists, and slips out into mainstream, they better put it into more practical uses than DDD.

Re:Translate Sign Language

[DarkSarin]

Where do I start? People are born lazy? Wow...

First, please show me the research that indicates that this is the case. I'd love to see it. I don't believe it exists, but I would love to see it. Frankly, it flies in the face of I think is the generally accepted position which is that although there is a genetic tendency for obesity (which also influences metabolism), the behavior trait (and that is what it is, although personality trait might be equally true) of laziness is a heavy mix of both environment and genetics. It is also domain-specific, which is a very important thing to realize.

From a hedonic motivation standpoint (read "A theory of Behavoir in Organizations" by Naylor, Pritchard & Ilgen if you can find it; if not, "Work Motivation" by Victor Vroom (1964) will also be illustrative), domain specificity is very useful in explaining why a person who does not engage in physical activity will spend considerable effort on playing video games. It is simply that they don't feel that their affect (mood, happiness, etc) will be as positively influenced by regular phsyical activity as it will by playing video games. Thus they will not engage in physical activity even though they will spend endless hours playing DDR.

From a purely objective standpoint, however, they are wrong. Regular exercise has been shown to be a very effective treatments of depression, as well as specifically elevating mood at the time of exercise. From a psychological aspect, the average gamer would be much happier if they got an hour or two of exercise each day (in addition to gaming heavily).

As far as personal responsibility goes, I have to take issue with that because you are making some very deep philosophical arguments. First, even if a person were born lazy (which I doubt, as expressed previously), would that mean that they could do nothing to change that? If nothing can be done to change that, then I can mostly accept what you say. If, however, they are born that way, but it can be changed, then it is the responsibility of their parent or relatives to do so, and any blame for failure in this is the parents. Personal responsibility is not the idea that you are responsible only for your actions, but that you are completely responsible for all of your actions, as well as the unintended consequences of them (such as unexpected offspring).

The problem with your argument for socialism (which is what you are defining) is that if enough people decide that they can live comfortably from the system, then they will cease to contribute to the system which sustains the less fortunate. This is to be predicted from almost every theory of behavior which I know. Not all of these people will quit working, but there are a number who would rather do other things, such as writing books of dubious quality (some people who would love to write but aren't any good would try it anyways). Certainly you would end up with a few people of exceptional talent and drive (now there's a word that makes me shudder!) that would always want to work, but the idea of allowing those that are just lazy to just be lazy is unworkable.

The idea of socialized care is noble in many ways--on the face of it, the idea of universal health care is a wonderful thing, but, aside from the much-touted meme of personal responsibility degrading under socialism, there are good reasons why it becomes unsustainable if carried to the extreme. Eventually, especially in the system you are touting, enough people quit contributing to the system and it becomes unstable and collapses.

The only way for socialism or communism to work is if everyone who is possibly able to is contributing to the system in some fashion. For it to really succeed and make everyone rich (which is the goal of true communism: to get rich together), it requires that everyone be working in their optimal endeavor (what they are best at), and to be as productive as they can. There is no room for laziness is this model, however.

In fact, being non-produ

But I still need to pay rent!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, a dance game where you have to actually dance? How revolutionary!

I'm currently pouting at the lack of specs. Is this going to be on my PS2 (*sigh*, PS3) or do I have to shell out for a new standalone application? Granted I didn't download the video...

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.

No fat kids

[sensei85]

Does this mean that the fat kid who lives at the arcade and plays 3+ hours of DDR every day yet never loses weight isn't going to be able to play DDD, because his silhouette can't possibly match up with the figures on the screen? I think that's unfair. Give sweaty headband kid a chance!

Re:Current Nintendo research in this area

[m0nstr42]

At first I thought there's no way you can get 3D motion from a single video frame (not a completely off-the-cuff comment, I know a thing or two about computer vision). Then the geometer in me said "but the dimensionality of the configuration space is limited by limb rigidity." Not every point on the body can be in any point in 3D space; e.g. the hand has to be ~12" from the elbow. If you can track the shoulder, elbow, and hand, you can estimate how long they are and deduce (up to some reflections) where they are in 3D space based on the rigid body kinematics (assuming the shoulder to be fixed as an example). Eliminate the reflections by ruling out those that would violate anatomically impossible poses and/or produce occlusions. It has flaws, but I'm curious if anyone's tried it. An old prof of mine was working on something similar involving tracking limb movement for pattern recognition, so it wouldn't surprise me if someone has looked into this.

That's right, I just generated and solved my own argument. The electronic extension of the voices in my head. :)

Re:DDR

[The Famous Brett Wat]

The game has an "autoplay" mode (press F8 during game-play, if memory serves, or select it in the main options menu). In this mode, the game does not keep score, but merely regards each step as perfectly accurate. I just jump around on the floor in front of it (and wear holes in the carpet -- good thing it was already torn by my old cheap office chair).

My computer is usually set up this way for exercise, because all I want to do is get my heart-rate up to a certain level, not keep score. In any case, failing a song would only interrupt the routine: I use the "endless" mode for exercise, so that there's a more or less constant stream of random songs. A modestly experienced player has a pretty good idea how well they're doing at any given song anyhow.

Re:DDR

[The Famous Brett Wat]

I've been through the honeymoon stage, and then reached the level of skill where a soft mat no longer responded quickly enough to my feet. Then, like an apprentice Jedi building his own lightsaber (pretentious, much?) I built my own hard dance platform. After much abuse, I eventually broke it. Likewise the MKII platform.

During one of these "no working platform" moments, I decided to try it sans platform entirely. I found it was actually better to work without the platform when exercising: when you're exercising, specifically, you aren't there to play the game as such.

My current exercise programme runs at approximately one hour a day, six days a week. I doubt that I've ever been fitter. I certainly haven't been slimmer in the last fifteen years. Yay for exercise-by-video-game!