Motion Feature Quantification of Different Roles in Nihon-Buyo Dance

Abstract

As the development of smart biped robots has been thriving, research and development of personal robots with unique personalities will become an important issue in the next decade. For instance, we might want to have robots capable of affording us pleasure by chatting, singing or joking with us in our homes. Most of these functions are realized by verbal communications. However, motion of a whole body, namely non-verbal communication, also plays an important role. We can get information concerning the personality of a subject when we observe his or her body motion. We may receive various impressions through their body motions. This means that human body movements convey emotion and the personality of the individual. Personality might be the involuntary and continuous expression of emotions, which are peculiar to an individual. The aim of our research is to investigate the mechanism of expressing personality through body motions, the mechanism of how we get emotional impressions from body motions, and finally to investigate what kind of motion we should give robots in order to make them express specific personality and/or emotional impressions. For this purpose, we employ Kansei information processing techniques, motion capturing, feature extraction from motion data and some statistical analyses, including regression analysis. The word “Kansei” is a Japanese word which is used to express some terms like “feeling” and “sensibility” in English. Kansei information processing is a method of extracting some features which are related to Kansei conveyed by the media we receive or, in contrast, a method of adding or generating some Kansei features to media produced by computers. In Kansei-related research, some types of psychological experiments are indispensable in order to measure the Kansei factor which humans receive. With this methodology we can measure quantitatively, for instance, the effect of a color, or combination of colors, on an observer. We employ motion-capturing techniques for obtaining human body movements, which has become common among the communities of film and CG animation production. Several systems are commercially available nowadays. For this investigation, we used the motions of Nihon-buyo, which is a Japanese traditional dance. The reasons why we chose this type of traditional dance form are as follows: First