Automatic Generation of Haptic Motion Effects Expressing Human Dance

Haptic motion effects refer to physical stimuli that stimulate the human vestibular system for various purposes, such as flight simulation and entertainment. Motion effects are intensively utilized in 4D films, which provide viewers with multisensory special effects with audiovisual stimuli. This paper focuses on the automatic creation of motion effects that express the physical movements in human dance. Such effects can significantly enhance the user’s multisensory experiences of watching and feeling a human dance. Taking the human motion capture data as input, our algorithms compute full six-degree-of-freedom motion effects featuring: (1) Separate processing of the external and internal movements of a dancer’s body; (2) Decomposing the internal movements into a few segments to obtain optimal motion effects between clarity and expressiveness; and (3) Merging of all external and internal movements with appropriate scaling and weights. Our novel method can elicit better user experiences than two previous motion effect generation algorithms, which respectively represent the movements in general articulated bodies and all dynamic components in the scene.