An interactive and concerted dance system - emotion extraction and support for emotional concert

A human activity that expresses one's emotion is significantly important in non-verbal communications. Human body motion such as a dance performance is one of the important factors in expressing such an emotion. An effective method to extract emotional information in real time from dance images is described. A novel heuristic function is also proposed to evaluate the degree of harmony between two dancers. As a typical application, a dance system called MIDAS that interactively combines dancers' images with video, sound, and CG characters is introduced. MIDAS can visualize how well dancers are in harmony with each other and encourage their expressions.