Motion Laboratory

The purpose of this research is to build a system allowing users to intuitively and easily search for required frames from a motion database. This system uses a Kinect device to input human body posture and then retrieve similar poses from the database. As a feature of human body posture, the distance between the hands and the distance between the ankles are calculated for each right-left, up-down, and front-back axis. The distance from pelvis to knees in the up-down axis is also calculated. The positional relationship of both hands as well as both foot are defined. These nine features are expressed at three levels. A query is specified from these combinations, and the appropriate data for the given conditions are extracted from the database. The motion file name and frame and image of the extracted poses can be displayed on a console in real time. In order to evaluate the usefulness of the system, an experiment was conducted using ten students. The results verified that this system was easy to operate and that it was useful for retrieving human body postures using Kinect.

The purpose of this research is to develop a 3D interactive interior simulation system on a PC. This system is intended to support people wanting to change the interior of their rooms easily. Users can add furniture pieces and arrange them on a 3D virtual space, as well as change their color and size. First, users can set the room size with the arrow keys and select one of four types of 3DCG furniture and insert it into the virtual room. The furniture can be placed anywhere in the virtual room by dragging and dropping it. Furniture pieces can be rotated in the vertical axis by right-clicking the mouse and resized using the mouse wheel. The texture of the furniture can be changed using the color selection window. As a supporting function of the interface, this system allows users to change the size of the furniture to any of three levels. In addition, the moving direction of the furniture is limited to the horizontal plane, while the rotation of the furniture is limited to the vertical axis. Ten students used the system to evaluate its usefulness. As a result, this system was verified as an effective means for designing the interiors easily.

With the increased implementation of compulsory dance education, the number of instructional materials for dance has risen. However, in most cases these teaching materials employ learning methods that lack interaction, such as books and DVDs. Problems such as the difficulty of the dance choreographies not matching the learner's skill level may occur. The purpose of this study is to support self-education in dance. In this study, I have developed a system that can automatically generate choreographies for training as desired by the user. Choreographies are generated using dance steps based on the level of difficulty and the number of steps specified by the user. The quantity of the choreographies is calculated from the difficulty of each step, the number of repetitions, and mirroring. Animations of the generated choreographies are displayed using a 3DCG character, whose motions have been captured from the performance of a professional hip-hop dancer. In order to evaluate this approach, twelve students tested the proposed system. As a result, they judged that the concept of the system was interesting and useful but that it was difficult to practice dance because there was no explanation of theoretical principles or how to move the body.

• Asako Soga, Keisuke Tsuda, Bin Umino, A System for Generating Choreography on Demand using Dance Motion, Proc. of NICOGRAPH International 2014 to appear (Gotland, Sweden), May. 2014

Capturing human motions has become easier, and many studies on natural user interfaces have been reported. The purpose of this research is to develop a virtual fitting system to support visitors in understanding the traditional methods of religious processions through augmented reality. By using a Kinect device, the system captures the skeleton of the user and recognizes the user's poses and motions. Poses are recognized by comparing the relative positions between joints, and motions are recognized by predefined poses. The system selects the image of a mask or a statue to display over the user's real image according to the recognition results. This composite image is then displayed on the screen by a projector. For motion recognition, the system displays virtual markers as a guide for the user to follow. This system was exhibited at Ryukoku museum, and about 130 visitors experienced the virtual fitting. The results of a questionnaire confirmed that 90 percent of the visitors understood the poses and motions of a Buddhist ceremonial procession deeply. This confirms that by using the system, users were able to better understand the actual exhibits at the museum.

• Asako Soga, Yusuke Niwa, Masahito Shiba, Yoshihiro Okada, Digital Archive and Exhibiting Methods of a Buddhist Ceremonial Procession, Proc. of the 9th International Conference on Signal Image Technology & Internet Based Systems, pp.372-377 (Kyoto, Japan), Dec. 2013

The purpose of this research is to develop a system to process human body motions for supporting dance creation using 3D motion data and tablet devices. This system allows users to process motion data and create motion variations by manipulating control points. Motion variations are created by selecting clips of previously recorded motion data of a number of dance choreographies, specifying a frame from the selected motion, and manipulating control points attached to the joints of an interactive CG dancer. Users are able to assign the position for a joint by using control points attached to the dancer's wrists, elbows, knees, and ankles. All control points can be moved, but only the wrist and ankle control points can be rotated. With inverse kinematics, the system calculates and displays in real-time the angles of each joint required to satisfy the control point's position. For each joint, key frames are used to let users apply the new motion in their preferred timing. Finally, by utilizing the tablet device's touch functionality, user's can reset the position and rotation of the shown control points with a double-tap touch gesture. To evaluate this approach, ten students who have no experience in dancing tested this system on a tablet device. They were able to create new variations of different motions with ease. Consequently, it was confirmed that this system is useful for creating variations of dance choreographies.

• Inggrama Aziz Anjani, Asako Soga, Motion Synthesis Methods for Supporting Dance Creation, The ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion in Games 2013, poster (Dublin, Ireland), Nov. 2013