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ChoreoVis: Planning and Assessing Formations in Dance Choreographies

Samuel Beck, Nina Doerr, Kuno Kurzhals, Alexander Riedlinger, Fabian Schmierer, Michael Sedlmair, Steffen Koch

TL;DR

ChoreoVis addresses the gap in visual analytics for choreographed group dances by providing a planning-focused visualization and a video-based assessment workflow. The system processes formations as JSON, maps video trajectories into planning space via perspective transformation, and offers a multi-view planning interface plus a video-linked assessment interface to analyze deviations and transitions. Through a case study with Latin formation dancing and an expert think-aloud study, the work demonstrates improved planning efficiency, actionable insights for practice, and strong practitioner acceptance, while acknowledging challenges in automatic tracking and areas for future enhancement. The approach promises practical impact by enabling faster, designer-guided iteration of choreographies and more precise training feedback, with potential extension to other group performances and immersive analytics.

Abstract

Sports visualization has developed into an active research field over the last decades. Many approaches focus on analyzing movement data recorded from unstructured situations, such as soccer. For the analysis of choreographed activities like formation dancing, however, the goal differs, as dancers follow specific formations in coordinated movement trajectories. To date, little work exists on how visual analytics methods can support such choreographed performances. To fill this gap, we introduce a new visual approach for planning and assessing dance choreographies. In terms of planning choreographies, we contribute a web application with interactive authoring tools and views for the dancers' positions and orientations, movement trajectories, poses, dance floor utilization, and movement distances. For assessing dancers' real-world movement trajectories, extracted by manual bounding box annotations, we developed a timeline showing aggregated trajectory deviations and a dance floor view for detailed trajectory comparison. Our approach was developed and evaluated in collaboration with dance instructors, showing that introducing visual analytics into this domain promises improvements in training efficiency for the future.

ChoreoVis: Planning and Assessing Formations in Dance Choreographies

TL;DR

ChoreoVis addresses the gap in visual analytics for choreographed group dances by providing a planning-focused visualization and a video-based assessment workflow. The system processes formations as JSON, maps video trajectories into planning space via perspective transformation, and offers a multi-view planning interface plus a video-linked assessment interface to analyze deviations and transitions. Through a case study with Latin formation dancing and an expert think-aloud study, the work demonstrates improved planning efficiency, actionable insights for practice, and strong practitioner acceptance, while acknowledging challenges in automatic tracking and areas for future enhancement. The approach promises practical impact by enabling faster, designer-guided iteration of choreographies and more precise training feedback, with potential extension to other group performances and immersive analytics.

Abstract

Sports visualization has developed into an active research field over the last decades. Many approaches focus on analyzing movement data recorded from unstructured situations, such as soccer. For the analysis of choreographed activities like formation dancing, however, the goal differs, as dancers follow specific formations in coordinated movement trajectories. To date, little work exists on how visual analytics methods can support such choreographed performances. To fill this gap, we introduce a new visual approach for planning and assessing dance choreographies. In terms of planning choreographies, we contribute a web application with interactive authoring tools and views for the dancers' positions and orientations, movement trajectories, poses, dance floor utilization, and movement distances. For assessing dancers' real-world movement trajectories, extracted by manual bounding box annotations, we developed a timeline showing aggregated trajectory deviations and a dance floor view for detailed trajectory comparison. Our approach was developed and evaluated in collaboration with dance instructors, showing that introducing visual analytics into this domain promises improvements in training efficiency for the future.
Paper Structure (19 sections, 5 figures, 1 table)

This paper contains 19 sections, 5 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background and Related Work
  3. Video, Sports, and Movement Visualization
  4. Interactive Authoring, Music and Time Visualization
  5. Domain and Requirements
  6. Method
  7. Tasks, Workflow, and Current Limitations
  8. Requirements
  9. ChoreoVis
  10. Data Processing
  11. Visualization for Planning
  12. Visual Assessment of Dance Performances
  13. Case Study
  14. Data
  15. Choreography Planning and Analysis
  16. ...and 4 more sections

Figures (5)

  • Figure 1: The iterative process of choreographing and practicing dance formations. ChoreoVis directly supports all steps except the practice of the choreography. We mainly address instructors, but the planning application can also be utilized for memorizing the formations.
  • Figure 2: Bounding box annotation for individual dancers, the 2D position is determined by the center-bottom point of the bounding box. Coordinates are then transformed from video space to planning space for comparison with the planned formations.
  • Figure 3: Interface of the choreography planning prototype: (a) the dance floor visualization shows the position of each dancer or couple in a formation, (b) a timeline shows the temporal arrangement of the formations, (c) a toolbar for changing views and navigating the formations, (d) a quick access menu for common edit tools, (e) the visualization legend, (f) a bar chart showing the distance moved between formations for each dancer, and (g) an app bar for loading and saving choreographies, switching between viewing and editing modes, and settings.
  • Figure 4: Included views: (a) the orientation view shows the position and orientation of each dancer in a formation, (b) the transition view shows the routes dancers take between formations and reveals potential problems, (c) the point definition view shows for which body part of which dancer in a couple the position is specified, (d) the shape view shows geometric abstractions of formations, (e) the 3D view shows dancers' poses, and (f) the heatmap shows the utilization of the dance floor.
  • Figure 5: Interface of the choreography assessment prototype: (a) the dance floor view shows the difference between defined and danced positions at a specific time, (b) a video of the performance with the bounding boxes of selected dancers, and (c) a timeline that visualizes the difference between defined and danced positions over the entire choreography.