Thursday 23 July 2009

Augmented Reality and dance


Lightstage - need to email to see what's happening.
Project Natal is in concept, a one sided version of this.

Presumably the next stage is to make Natal comprehend multiple angles. Rig a few cameras up in different corners of the room, and then all sidess are seen.

Mocap for the 21st century.

Head cam for the 21st century: http://gizmodo.com/5320375/christian-bale-rant-victim-is-the-man-behind-the-canon-eos-5d-mark-ii-helmet

Why?


This can capture a dance, both in video, but also in 3 Dimensional space, showing your body movements (at least at the simple level, but presumably start to get more refined and higher resolution).

- Your dance
- Your teacher's dance
- A dance at an event
- A private lesson
- At a dance hall

Recall - you have the dance captured - you can go over fine detail whenever, wherever
Improve - you can problem solve spins, movements, timing (care to have the 3d visually pulse with colour in time with the music beat/rhythm/instrument)
Learn - See a routine and slow it down - at a much finer level and smoother when at non-1x speeds.


Could you have 2 streams of data - a HD or VGA version, and then along that the feed from what the Natal webcam receives as input/ what gets crunched and uses as output. If you could collect both at the same time, close enough, you could even overlay them - in in effect add motion capture skeletons, avatars overlaid or whathave you.

Whether or not this is Real Time (RT) - in effect you get to a wirestick model of people, with avatar possibilities.

A move library, where every move could smoothly be linked to every other one?
Think this needs pictures.

iPhone App 2 Salsa learning

If Mental Case got n-sided cards (so you could have a card for footwork, card for key points, card for what it linked from and linked to in a routine (or what it could link to/from). That'd be useful - Drew's already talking about audio, and possibly video.

With video, you could link snippets of a routine - literally splice out each move, to then allow (you'd have to line up the camera for the start and end positions :/) you to mix and mtch moves to make a routine, or video a routine, splice, then remember it/ what your routine form different classes could be like joined together in various ways (so the video pieces being say x number of bars long rather than just 2-4).

iPhone App 1 Salsa

An example of what Google Maps can do - mapping extreme sports locations on a map.
But a pin in a map doesn't help so much, as a rank by wind/distance/quality of sites, knowing where you are and how far it is to drive to the locations - all info you can gather and push to the user.

Same with salsa - there are several static lists of events and classes, that get updated at various speeds - but you've got to search through most - a list of addressses.

With decent data on each venue - when where, level, how much, who by, parking info, how long, what style etc
You could start to move away from a nasty excel spreadsheet, and more towards a more useful UI for a person looking to go and have a dance, or a dance lesson, whereever, whenever.