Digital Agents on the Way? Computers have been capturing human movement for a while now. It is useful in producing animated video and film, but its application to everyday movement issues practically ends there. It seems to take a human brain to recognize and deal with human movement. After all, like fingerprints and DNA, movement patterns are unique to the person creating them. How could the drudgery of binary code possibly be useful?
According to an article in the New York Time's Circuits section, that may change. Researchers at NYU now have a National Science Foundation Grant to train computers to recognize the subtlety of human movement. A big part of this project is adapting Laban Movement Analysis for automatically recognizing and analyzing movement. A quote from the article:
"Laban is concerned not just with the obvious stuff of where people are, but with the nuances of how they got there," he said. Laban's system addresses the difference, for instance, between waving cheerfully or sadly, or the many differences in touch. "There is the gentleness of touching someone as though your hands were feathers," Dr. Warburton said, as well as a touch strong enough to push a car.
What does all this mean for movement educators? I'm not sure. But I remember wishing for lots more help in observing movements during my training. Maybe a well-designed automated observational agent could have been useful.
- Posted - 10:30:32 AM -
