Motion Laboratory

Classical ballet is a traditional dance, and it has a strictly defined basic stance and fundamental motions such as straightening the upper body, opening the leg outside, and standing on tiptoe. On the other hand, in contrast to ballet, there is no basic posture in contemporary dance that developed into specific movements but rather a wide variety of possible movements. In this research, we propose to quantitatively analyze the differences between classical ballet and contemporary dance by using motion capture data. First, the quantity of physical characteristics was calculated. To examine the inclination of the head and the upper part of the body, the angle of the head and posture was calculated. To examine the direction of bending and stretching the arm, the angle of the elbow was calculated. To examine whether the dancer was standing on tiptoe and the direction of the foot, the angle of the heel was calculated. Then, Principal Component Analysis was executed for the amount of the calculated physical characteristics to verify whether a special tendency appeared. As a result, the differences between the two kinds of dance could be confirmed.

The purpose of this research is to develop a creation-support system for content production and choreography creation utilizing the human body motion obtained by a motion-capture system. We have developed a system for simulating human motion by synthesizing body-section movement. In this system, the movement of each body section is selected with a touch panel device, and the result of the synthesized motion can be displayed with CG animation in real time. The possibility of such synthesis is judged by the floor contact of body section to exclude the generation of unnatural motion. As a result, we confirmed that most unnatural motions were excluded by the purposed restriction. In addition, implementing the restriction is more useful for simulating body motion than not using it.

The goal of this research is to use 3D motion data for art content and creative works by CG. 3D motion data of the human body were applied to plant objects. This research designed skeletal structures and CG objects of liliaceae and lotus plants that have the same number of joints as the human upper body. Upper-body motion data were applied to plant motion. In consideration of the range of the human joints, conversion of the coordinate axis and alignment of the distance between plant joints were designed. Skin weights of plant objects were fixed to smoothly move plants that have a few joints. By using these methods, six classical ballet motions and fourteen contemporary dance motions were applied to the plant objects. The results of an evaluation questionnaire confirmed that the proposed method allowed the plants to express pliable motions.