The paper entitled “Designing Interactive Visuals for Dance from Body Maps: Machine Learning and Composite Animation Approaches”, co-authored by Nuno N. Correia, Raul Masu, William Primett, Stephan Jürgens, Jochen Feitsch, and Hugo Plácido da Silva (It researcher and DBE Professor), has won a Best Paper Award at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS).

There is a growing interest in interactive visuals for dance performance. Recent research has identified potential in using interactive visuals to convey to the audience otherwise non-visible elements of performances. Informed by some design, and with a co-design perspective, the authors aim to make apparent non-visible bodily aspects of dancers.

They propose in this paper to design interactive visuals from body maps, following two approaches – Machine Learning and Composite Animation. For this purpose, they conducted a multi-stage study involving 12 dancers, and then present and discuss the results of the evaluation, confirming that both prototypes were successful in addressing the initial purpose, yet with some limitations.

The main contributions of this paper are the two approaches for designing interactive visuals from body maps and their analysis. These are materialized in two software systems released as open-source and in their design framework descriptions.

ACM SIGCHI Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) is the premier international arena where designers, artists, psychologists, user experience researchers, systems engineers, and many more, come together to debate and shape the future of interactive systems design and practice. The theme for DIS 2022 was “Digital Wellbeing” and was held online from June 13-June 17, 2022.

Link to the paper: