Blazing fire or breezy wind? A story-driven playful experience for annotating dance movement

Abstract

The annotation of animated motion-captured segments is a challenging, interdisciplinary task, especially when it comes to characterizing movement qualitatively. The lack of intuitive, easy-to-learn-and-use frameworks is considered to be one of the biggest challenges in this process; another is the lack of approaches able to motivate a wide audience of users, from the broader public to dance experts, researchers and performers, to contribute with annotations. In this paper we present Motion Hollow, a story-driven playful experience that uses metaphors based on Laban Movement Analysis, an established framework for movement analysis and annotation, to familiarize novice users with the process of qualitative characterization of dance moves. This work proposes a first step into introducing movement annotation to non-expert users, and as such, its main goal is to explore the implications and potential of such an approach. The evaluation of the experience confirms its potential to transform the annotation of dance movement segments into an engaging and enjoyable experience as well as to foster a deeper understanding of movement annotation both as a concept and process.