Visualization of Folk-Dances in Virtual Reality Environments

Cultural tourism helps with the preservation or revival of culture and traditions. It includes many different attractions including performing arts and festivals. Since folk dances are part of cultural heritage and their preservation has major importance, this paper presents applications for visualization and learning of folk dances. Based on different interactive motion capture technologies, new approaches for observing, analyzing and learning dances, and movements in general, have been created. A popular approach for learning purposes is to record a professional dancer using motion capture technologies and then visualize the dance. Users are supposed to watch and imitate the teacher’s performances. In this paper, a similar approach is proposed, where users can choose the dance they want to watch through an interactive interface, and they can see the teacher’s avatar performing the chosen dance. At the same time the avatar of the user can be seen, and users can track their performance. For recording teachers’ and users’ dance performances, an optical motion capture system, namely OptiTrack, has been used. The dance performance of the teacher is pre-recorded off-line, while users’ performance is recorded and streamed in real-time to the application. Through the interface, users can choose to watch different folk dances and different ways of visualization for learning purposes.