Modality Influence on the Motor Learning of Ballroom Dance with a Mixed-Reality Human-Machine Interface

Mastering ballroom dance requires learning motor skills such as synchronizing the body motion to a tempo as well as memorizing long sequences of dance steps. Traditionally, the acquisition of these skills is guided by an instructor, who adapts the training to the level of the trainee. However, due to the measures that are taken globally against the COVID19, a great number of training facilities have partially or completely restricted access to their trainers. To facilitate the practice of ballroom dance without the need of a human instructor nor human contact, this paper presents a mixed-reality human-machine interface that provides part practice of ballroom dance. It achieves it by fractionalizing the dance into only the footwork and conveying the tempo, position trajectory, and velocity trajectory with multimodal feedback. The multimodal feedback is generated with a floor projection, vibrotactile actuators, and a metronome, which provide visual, haptic, and auditory feedback. In an experiment with 15 participants, results suggest that the motor learning of dance skills occurs when visual and haptic feedback is present, whereas it is further improved when the three modalities (visual, haptic, and auditory) are employed during training.