Empowering Dancers Through Mixed Reality: Designing Tools that Help Dancers Explore Movement Qualities in Solo Learning Environments

Movement quality is defined as the way humans execute movements with respect to time and space. In the field of dance, movement quality is the expressive part of movement that allows dancers communicate emotions with others.

Within the circle of dance learners, one of the challenges is the difficulty of exploring a variety of movement qualities of dance moves. Learners wish to easily find different ways of executing one dance move, and be able to understand new movement qualities so that they can learn and expand the expressive power of their own body. However, existing dance learning environments prevent learners from either (a) see enough quality variations, (b) compare two movement qualities, or (c) focus on self movement and progress. Unfortunately, all three are required for a fruitful movement quality exploration.

My thesis project explores opportunities for mixed reality technology to help dancers explore a variety of movement qualities in solo learning environments. Based on the derived design insights and principles from research, I designed a desktop application with an armband controller to help dancers (a) discover new movement qualities via both crowd-sourced collection and body awareness (b) easily understand the relations between the body and movement qualities via 3 types of feedback, and (c) increase exploration efficiency via a seamless practice flow