CMU School of Drama


Thursday, November 13, 2014

Emergence is the Perfect AI Dance Partner

The Creators Project: An interactive, virtual dance partner—it’s what we’ve always dreamed of. And while it may not take the form of our fleeting fantasies, there’s something decidedly alluring about the crystalline contortions of Grevillea Crystalis Incarnadine. It’s bright, it changes color—it even has its own unique sense of style. And what’s more? It’s actually intelligent.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

In the original video posted on the page, the use of interactive technology didn't seem to be that powerful. The computer generated image of the red person, just mimicked what the dancer did, and i wasnt able to see any correlation between the dancer and the crystalline entity. However, upon further investigation of some of the other videos of the project. The performance agent really beings to convince me that it has a personality of its own when the computer takes its movement cues from the person, but then dances its own dance for a moment, it is fascinating to watch.

Paula Halpern said...

I agree with Chris. The AI dancer that the video shows, especially the crystal, doesn't really seem to have any correlation with the dancer. And I can understand that the crystal makes up moves and takes cues from the dancer's motion, I really don't think that it looks as good the way it was meant to. If the dancer were dancing with an actual human dance partner, then if they were doing different things, we could see the connection. But when the other dancer is a projected crystal, I think people have more trouble seeing the connection. So honestly, I think they need to make this dance partner connection more obvious to viewers are aware that there isn't just some unrelated crystal bouncing along to the music.

Becki Liu said...

This was disappointing. At first I thought it was going to be really cool because when they had the image of the a human figure following the movements of the dancer using motion trackers I was imagining things because beautiful and spectacular. Instead, they used a crystal like image and moved when the dancer did... it barely even imitated the dancer's movement. It was kind of like when they have sound activated images and all that happens is the circle gets bigger when the sound gets louder... LAME. I feel like there is so much more that can be done and people let these great opportunities slip between their fingers and produce something like this which I feel has been done before and was cool about 10 years ago!!! The film industry has been using tracking devices for quite a while now and look what they can do! Use a human face to create expressions on a digital dragon!?! That is amazing. This could have been amazing, but it was just a missed opportunity.

Christopher Essex said...

THIS IS AWESOME! Okay so as someone who has had some dance training in the performance area I know the best part of our pieces that normally adds the finishing touch are normally the lights. Well this I think is even more interesting than that because it is like the lights are equal in the performance. They are our partner. I think what's most interesting is the smart technology involved in it that helps it move and formulate its own actions based off of the actions of the dancer. I think this is certainly a strong first step into the right direction but I believe this new element can be expanded upon even more and will certainly come to wow audiences.