Collaborative dancing in tele-immersive environment

Abstract

We present a study of collaborative dancing between remote dancers in a tele-immersive environment which features 3D full and real body capturing, wide field of view, multi-display 3D rendering, and attachment free participant. We invite two professional dancers to perform collaborative dancing in the environment. The coordination requires one dancer to take the lead while the other follows by appropriate movement. Throughout the experiment, the dancers are dancing at various motion rates to evaluate how well the collaborative dancing is supported with the current technical boundary. Our important findings indicate that 1) tele-immersive environments have strong potential impact on the concept of choreography and communication of live dance performance, 2) the presence of multi-view display, real body 3D rendering, audio channel, and less intrusiveness greatly enhances the immersive and dancing experience, and 3) the level of synchronization achieved by the dancers is higher than that expected from the video rate.

The Short-Term Effects of Real-Time Virtual Reality Feedback on Motor Learning in Dance

“…The efficacy of training sports skills in virtual environments has been examined, but not conclusively, in domains as varied as snowboarding (Spelmezan, Jacobs, Hilgers, & Borchers, 2009), martial arts (Yang & Kim, 2002), golf (Honjo, Isaka, Mitsuda, & Kawamura, 2003), target-driven aiming tasks (Huegel, Celik, Israr, & O'Malley, 2010;, tai chi (Patel, Bailenson, Jung, Diankov, & Bajcsy, 2006), aerobic exercise training (Ruttkay & van Welbergen, 2008), and dance (Yang, Yu, Diankov, Wu, & Bajscy, 2006;Nakamura, Presence, Vol. 20, No.…”

Towards Multi-Site Collaboration in 3D Tele-Immersive Environments

“…Each 3D video stream can consume a large amount of bandwidth (e.g., 640 × 480 × 15f ps × 5B/pixel ≈ 180M bps), making even two sites of collaboration challenging enough. Moreover, the rendering time cost, which is about 10ms/stream by our measurement [28], grows linearly with the number of streams. The problem is exacerbated if multiple sites are connected together, with each site producing tens of such large streams, which can easily exceed the bandwidth and timing bounds 1 .…”

“…We configure the experiment parameters close to real-life settings. According to the measurement by our implemented 3DTI system [19,28], the available bandwidth of tele-immersive sites on Internet2 could vary between 40Mbps and 150Mbps, and a 3D video stream after using a series of reduction techniques (e.g., background subtraction [11], resolution reduction, real-time 3D compression [25,14]) is approximately 5-10Mbps. We evaluate two types of node capacity distribution: (1) uniform: a capacity of O i = I i = 20 ± where 1 ≤ i ≤ N and is uniformly distributed between 0 and 5.…”

“…Over the last few years, 3DTI has shown great potentials in a wide range of applications such as video-conferencing, distance learning of physical activities, collaborative art performance, firefighter training, and medical consultation [2,12,17,24,28].…”

“…Therefore, the "all-to-all" data distribution scheme, adopted by existing 2D video-conferencing and 3DTI systems ( [2,9]), has to be abandoned as the scale of the 3DTI system grows. As a concrete example, the 3DTI system described in [28] involved two sites thousands of miles apart, each sending about ten streams to the other. With the measured resource limits, even three-site collaboration was not possible if all streams from each site were sent to all other sites.…”