Preserve the cultural heritage by creating a proof-of-concept of a motion capture repository of dance motions built in a method allowing interpolations, extrapolations and synthesis through similarity search among different compositions documenting diverse and specialized dance movement practices.
Dance, apart from being a performance art, has been for many years a social expression and part of the intangible cultural heritage. WhoLoDancE creates the tools and methodologies to capture, analyse and project the different aspects of movement to both a wider audience and next generations, providing useful tools for scholars such as Choreologists, Ethnochoreologists, Dance Historians and Sociologists.
Furthermore, music and dance are also expressions of culture and feelings transmitted through particular sounds, patterns, and/or dance movements, characteristics of individual personalities and of their collective resonance in specific moments in history. WhoLoDancE, preserving and re-using this valuable heritage, will contribute to the valorisation Europe artistic as well as cultural resources.
The ability to easily navigate and explore large collections of dance data will enhance the development of digital learning and teaching resources. The ability to find structurally similar dance sequences will help students discover the diversity of European dance culture while at the same time appreciating the commonalities shared across the different dance languages.
Furthermore, once the WhoLoDancE paradigm and proof-of-concept development will be established for dance (possibly one of the most complex human activities), a similar approach can be extended to arts, crafts, and professions which have long constituted a European specialty and now risk to get lost and disappear if they are not captured into appropriate 3D visualized databases. WhoLoDancE can not only open the way to further research in Psychology and Cognitive Science, but also to an increased acknowledgement of the possibility of recording, reconstructing, preserving and conserving the representation and heritage of priceless traditional skills, which must not be allowed to fall into universal neglect, and should rather be re-proposed to be viewed and analysed in holographic performances or traveling exhibitions in selected venues, such as theatres, museums, and other appropriate public spaces.
Wholodance is making use of advanced motion capture technologies, EMG and bio-sensors to transfer dance movements into digital data in such a way that makes it possible to blend any specific motion element with any other motion element within the database.
The way that the database is created, converts the raw motion capture data from 3dimensional marker position arrays to joint rotations of an inverse kinematic skeleton, and then in turn, to arrays of velocities and accelerations of all body parts separately creating a coherent and comprehensive motion capture database.
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