As a senior research assistant at Coventry University’s Centre for Dance Research I am working alongside Prof. Sarah Whatley, Dr. Karen Wood, and Ruth Gibson http://gibsonmartelli.com/ on a 3 year project WhoLo DancE. http://www.wholodance.eu/
Wholodance aims at developing and applying breakthrough technologies to Dance Learning in order to achieve results that will have relevant impacts on numerous targets including, but not limited to, the dance practitioners ranging from Researchers and Professionals to Dance Students and the Interested Public.
Wholodance focuses on five main Objectives listed and briefly described below:
- Investigate bodily knowledge by applying similarity search tools, computational models, emotional content analysis and techniques for the automated analysis of non-verbal expressive movement to dance data that will help investigate movement and learning principles, vocabularies, mental imagery and simulation connected to Dance Practises.
- Preserve the Cultural Heritage by creating a proof-of-concept motion capture repository of dance motions built in methods allowing interpolations, extrapolations and synthesis through similarity search among different compositions documenting diverse and specialized dance movement practices, and learning approaches.
- Innovate the Teaching of Dance by developing among others a life-size volumetric display that will enable a dance student to literally step inside the Dance master’s body that through the use of immersive and responsive motion capture data, will Identify and respond to collisions between the physical and virtual bodies.
- Revolutionize Choreography by building and structuring an interactive repository of motion capture dance libraries. Custom dance data blending engine will give choreographers and dance teachers a powerful tool to blend and assemble an infinite number of dance compositions.
- Widen the access and practice of Dance by providing access to the created dance database through commercially available consumer grade motion capture devices like the MS Kinect, Intel’s real sense and others.
The Flamenco Motion Capture took place in Amsterdam in mid-July with the MOTEK team and the WhoLo crew. Here are a few images and videos of the work.
3rd WhoLo DancE Motion Capture Session- Timelapse of the team on Day 6: Flamenco https://vimeo.com/175062410
Capturing Flamenco- Footage of Day 6 https://vimeo.com/175072715
3rd WhoLo DancE Motion Capture Session- Timelapse of the team on Day 7:Flamenco https://vimeo.com/175196081
Capturing Flamenco- Footage of Day 7 https://vimeo.com/175205043
