VVG: Vision, Video, and Graphics

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Studying the Fidelity Requirements for a Virtual Ballet Dancer
(The Eurographics Association, 2003) Neagle, R.J.; Ng, K.; Ruddle, R.A.; Peter Hall and Philip Willis
Teaching dance, especially ballet, usually involves the phrase: 'watch, copy and learn' and improvement is made by emulation. This involves not only how to achieve the steps but also the quality of the movement. In this paper, we present research into the fidelity that is required for a virtual ballet dancer driven by dance notation and its affect on the users ability to distinguish between expressive movement. The overall aim is to create a visualisation system that professionals could use to understand not only the choreography, but the expressive movement when resurrecting ballet scores and would be of benefit to teaching dance at all levels. Using Laban's effort theory to characterise the motion, this paper highlights the importance of the time factor to differentiate emotions. Two experiments are discussed that were designed to identify the accuracy of distinguishing emotions in ballet at lower levels of fidelity. The first experiment analyses the affect of the visual appearance on a 2D display and the second experiment looks into aspect of realism in the movement between keyframes defined by a dance notation. This paper explores understanding the quality of movement required for a virtual dancer, specifically, the expressivity encapsulated in the motion between key poses.