Greetings, all! Here are my notes I promised Sita about my presentation at Stanford University's Center for the Study of Language and Information entitled: Dance+Technology - Humanizing the Web. It took place today in Cordura Hall, Room 100, from noon to 2:00 pm. The Dance+Technology presentation was attended by 30-35 people. Half were dancers (students and faculty) and half were researchers in the area of human-computer interaction or computer science students. By the end they were all talking to one another in a very animated manner, looking for ways to collaborate. Basically, I had only one slide, a layer cake: ACCESS PERFORMANCE IMPROVISATION - COMPOSITION ANALYSIS NOTATION ANATOMY >From the bottom up, these were the key areas I have explored with dancers in developing a new and different 3D human animation system, which I was only too happy to demonstrate. I owe a lot to the choreographers who have guided me: Boris Willis, Linda Miller, Elizabeth Streb, Deborah Thayer, Daniel Nagrin, Susan Shields, Jim Lepore, and Michael Tracy. Dancers Emilie & Carl Flink, formerly with the Jose Limon Company did an excellent job of illustrating through movement what is wrong with commercially available 3D human models, how movement notation and movement analysis notation could help the process of creating an American Sign Language synthesizer, how the dance community could help create a curriculum of improvisations or computer simulations to build a proper interface for various real-life situations where the human-computer interface may incorporate gesture, and in general how dance can affect technology as opposed to the hotly debated topic of how technology affects dance. Using the worldview of Douglas Engelbart (who is here at Stanford this semester), inventor of the mouse, hypertext and groupware for high-performance organizations, my own comments centered around the idea that in return for what the dance world can contribute to technology (a way to better address issues such as disabilities, telemedicine, teleconferencing, human factors engineering, etc.) the technology world should be able to come up with more than embedding multimedia in dance performances. The Engelbartian concept of not only improving the organizational processes but also improving the improvement process itself can come into play here if technology can augment the process of dance preservation and access with robust digital libraries that can interlink many different datatypes and databases along with real-time tools that can make the dancer's precious time in the studio more productive (in dancer's terms). When all the smoke finally clears, the "killer app" is not some human animation system or smart stages or streaming video, but is the dance company itself, fully empowered with the very best that technology has to offer. I was heartened to see in the last half- hour that just about everyone present was prepared to take on the challenge or already actively doing so. Neil Scott, head of the Archimedes Project announced his commitment to include dancers, labanotators and movement analysts in a three-year program of gesture analysis for human-computer interfaces. Several immediately volunteered. John Simmons Sita Popat wrote: > > Hi John > > Would it be possible for notes from the discussion to be posted on the > list? > It sounds like it will be interesting. > > Sita
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