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A while ago, I wanted to annotate martial arts movements so I asked to a professional dancer friend of mine. She didn't know any way to do it. That surprised me

A while ago, I wanted to annotate martial arts movements so I asked to a professional dancer friend of mine. She didn't know any way to do it. That surprised me. Seeing this, I can't avoid to think in formal languages. Maybe, even it's possible to define, formally, a particular dancing style as a grammar that doesn't admit movements from other styles.

vlasev 11y ago
It highly depends on the dance, its age and its history. Ballroom dancing, for example, has notation for various elements of movement. Here[1] you can find examples. If you check them out, you'll see a fair bit of complexity. Overall, ballroom dancing is even more complicated than that and it's difficult if not impossible to come up with a good notation that would describe most of the movement. For social dancing or for the lower levels, maybe, but once you start talking about the various different elements of foot placement, leg action, body action and 3D movement, it becomes almost useless to think of it in terms of dense notation. There are many layers of complexity here, perhaps not all too different in nature from the layers of complexity when dealing with computers and software. In dancing, the goal is usually to start somewhere in the middle and make your way up towards more abstract ways of thinking about it and also down towards more fine technical detail. [1]: https://www.worlddancesport.org/WDSF/Academy/Technique_Books https://www.worlddancesport.org/WDSF/Academy/Technique_Books
logfromblammo 11y ago
Mostly for dance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benesh_Movement_Notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benesh_Movement_Notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labanotation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labanotation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eshkol-Wachman_movement_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eshkol-Wachman_movement_notati... For sign language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SignWriting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SignWriting Those systems, designed for different purposes, lack essential elements necessary for martial arts movements, like weight distribution, facing, weapons, footing, and opponents. You would probably have better luck examining the code for mocapped animations, particularly for 3-D fighting games and movies. But you'll have to come up with your own abstraction. There are just too many degrees of freedom in a human body to have a one-size-fits-all kinetography system that is also easy to read and write. That's probably why some martial art systems have so many names for positions and movements. The periodic table for atomic martial art movements is huge, especially now that MMA has spurred so much cross-disciplinary study.
- Chris_Newton 11y ago
  You would probably have better luck examining the code for mocapped animations, particularly for 3-D fighting games and movies. I think mocap has a lot of potential (though I’m biased here[1]). For example, there have been some interesting experiments capturing performances by sportspeople of different levels and comparing them. These might be looking for patterns in what the better performers do differently, which might then give some ideas for how to train less experienced performers. Some elite sports teams and athletes also use mocap technology to analyse their form and look for details that are difficult to see with human eyes in real time. The challenge is that even state-of-the-art mocap technology is still a very long way from modelling the full complexity of the human musculoskeletal system. Remember that a lot of what you see in games, and particularly in big budget movies, was originally based on mocap data but then manually refined by skilled people for a considerable period of time. The mocap is certainly a useful starting point and it’s getting better all the time, but there’s a long way to go before it will get the fine details right. That said, even with today’s systems, the amount of data you get from a decent mocap set-up means there is a lot you can investigate, as long as you know what you want to look for. As you say, there are a lot of degrees of freedom in a human body, and coming up with the right abstractions to capture the important details is a challenge in itself. [1] I help to run www.ballroomgenie.com, which is a training aid featuring animations of ballroom moves using mocap-driven CGI instead of traditional live video footage. This lets us show various useful effects that live footage can’t, typically because of physics or because in our little niche market no-one can afford movie-level camera set-ups and editing to record the same action from many different perspectives simultaneously. On the other hand, even working with high calibre performers and studio as we do, it still takes a lot of work to get acceptable quality, and we’re still a long way from being able to reproduce truly lifelike footage. This is partly because we don’t have a Hollywood budget and a whole team of people to get each animation just right, but it’s also because as far as I know the technology to model a human body accurately enough that things like contact and pressure are spot on simply doesn’t exist yet.
  - arafalov 11y ago
    I'd love to talk geek and marketing about this project of yours. I have ideas for a _very_ similar (but not competing) one, but was not ready to jump on it until I see some validation. Your link just did that. If you are interested, I am 'arafalov' pretty much everywhere.

vlasev 11y ago

It highly depends on the dance, its age and its history. Ballroom dancing, for example, has notation for various elements of movement. Here[1] you can find examples. If you check them out, you'll see a fair bit of complexity. Overall, ballroom dancing is even more complicated than that and it's difficult if not impossible to come up with a good notation that would describe most of the movement. For social dancing or for the lower levels, maybe, but once you start talking about the various different elements of foot placement, leg action, body action and 3D movement, it becomes almost useless to think of it in terms of dense notation. There are many layers of complexity here, perhaps not all too different in nature from the layers of complexity when dealing with computers and software. In dancing, the goal is usually to start somewhere in the middle and make your way up towards more abstract ways of thinking about it and also down towards more fine technical detail. [1]: https://www.worlddancesport.org/WDSF/Academy/Technique_Books https://www.worlddancesport.org/WDSF/Academy/Technique_Books

logfromblammo 11y ago

Mostly for dance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benesh_Movement_Notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benesh_Movement_Notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labanotation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labanotation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eshkol-Wachman_movement_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eshkol-Wachman_movement_notati... For sign language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SignWriting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SignWriting Those systems, designed for different purposes, lack essential elements necessary for martial arts movements, like weight distribution, facing, weapons, footing, and opponents. You would probably have better luck examining the code for mocapped animations, particularly for 3-D fighting games and movies. But you'll have to come up with your own abstraction. There are just too many degrees of freedom in a human body to have a one-size-fits-all kinetography system that is also easy to read and write. That's probably why some martial art systems have so many names for positions and movements. The periodic table for atomic martial art movements is huge, especially now that MMA has spurred so much cross-disciplinary study.

Chris_Newton 11y ago
You would probably have better luck examining the code for mocapped animations, particularly for 3-D fighting games and movies. I think mocap has a lot of potential (though I’m biased here[1]). For example, there have been some interesting experiments capturing performances by sportspeople of different levels and comparing them. These might be looking for patterns in what the better performers do differently, which might then give some ideas for how to train less experienced performers. Some elite sports teams and athletes also use mocap technology to analyse their form and look for details that are difficult to see with human eyes in real time. The challenge is that even state-of-the-art mocap technology is still a very long way from modelling the full complexity of the human musculoskeletal system. Remember that a lot of what you see in games, and particularly in big budget movies, was originally based on mocap data but then manually refined by skilled people for a considerable period of time. The mocap is certainly a useful starting point and it’s getting better all the time, but there’s a long way to go before it will get the fine details right. That said, even with today’s systems, the amount of data you get from a decent mocap set-up means there is a lot you can investigate, as long as you know what you want to look for. As you say, there are a lot of degrees of freedom in a human body, and coming up with the right abstractions to capture the important details is a challenge in itself. [1] I help to run www.ballroomgenie.com, which is a training aid featuring animations of ballroom moves using mocap-driven CGI instead of traditional live video footage. This lets us show various useful effects that live footage can’t, typically because of physics or because in our little niche market no-one can afford movie-level camera set-ups and editing to record the same action from many different perspectives simultaneously. On the other hand, even working with high calibre performers and studio as we do, it still takes a lot of work to get acceptable quality, and we’re still a long way from being able to reproduce truly lifelike footage. This is partly because we don’t have a Hollywood budget and a whole team of people to get each animation just right, but it’s also because as far as I know the technology to model a human body accurately enough that things like contact and pressure are spot on simply doesn’t exist yet.
- arafalov 11y ago
  I'd love to talk geek and marketing about this project of yours. I have ideas for a _very_ similar (but not competing) one, but was not ready to jump on it until I see some validation. Your link just did that. If you are interested, I am 'arafalov' pretty much everywhere.