Another Week and....A James Brown

The beginning of the week I talked with Adam, a postdoc in our lab. Since the research I was working on was related to what he had done, I sat down and discussed with him his approach to a similar research problem.

My tuesday meeting I discussed with Ron and Jessica about machine learning techniques that could be used to identify a motion's correctness. The meeting was also used to setup a meeting time during SIGGRAPH. In the meeting, it was decided that I should captured motion data of one of the exercises.

The end of the week I prepared my James Brown imitation. My family reunion was during the weekend. Since the motion capture lab had the best floors for praticing James Brown, I spent my time there at nights to capture James Brown essence. It worked perfectly as on Friday night, during the entertainment section of my family reunion dinner, my family went crazy when I performed James Brown. It was also a good experiment on myself to understand how I self taught myself a given motion and try to imitate it. All I had as my learning tool was youtube videos.

I think an interesting research problem would be extracting the choreography from a video and use it to train a user to perform the dance in the routine. I believe people have already started on this research but I would be interested in continuing the progress.

Here is the list of James Brown performance videos I used to learn the James Brown:
James Brown - Get Up Offa That Thing
James Brown - There was a time (1968)
James Brown - Good Foot
James Brown - It's a man's world medley (Apollo 1968)
James Brown/Please please please
James Brown- Sex Machine / Soul Power
James Brown gives you dancing lessons
James Brown - E I Feel Good