Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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!
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.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.