Accessible Contemporary Dance
This research aims to address the barriers to participation in recreational body movement for BLV individuals and explore accessible dance education design possibilities, with a particular focus on dance activities. Employing a co-design methodology involving BLV adults and teachers in all phases, the research is to understand challenges and generate prototypes supporting both learning and creative practice of Contemporary dance for BLV individuals. This research considers multi-modal interactions focussing verbal instructions, tactile affordances, sonification and haptics.
Actively participating in recreational body movement such as dance, sports, and fitness activities has always been a challenge to people who are blind or have low vision (BLV). This is due to limited accommodation for BLV people in teaching methods such as 'do it like this' instructions relying heavily on visual representations, vague verbal instructions, and (somewhat) problematic physical touch-based guidance.
Recent work in human-centred computing, visualisation community and inclusive technologies provides potential ways to represent body movement for BLV people to experience it as an audience. However, only a few have considered educational applications, and there is limited involvement with the BLV community and their teachers to understand their needs. There is potential to explore multiple modalities in this research space.
We conducted initial studies in understanding needs, challenges and opportunities of this problem space. Thus, as first stage of this project is a discovery phase having conversations with BLV people and their teachers in understanding problems of existing body movement learning and teaching methods. We explored in several contexts, such as sports, martial arts, fitness, and dance, considering a holistic approach.
Madhuka De Silva, Sarah Goodwin, Leona Holloway, Matthew Butler. 2023. In Proc. ASSETS’23.
We conducted several bodystorming dance workshops with BLV students and dance teachers exploring tactile affordances, sonification and haptics. Our next step is to develop the prototypes further and evaluate the system for dance learning goals. Above image indicates snapshot of our initial prototype with motion capture camera tracking teacher's (right) poses and providing feedback to BLV student on the left through sound (speakers) and haptic (glove) feedback.
Video at the start is from our latest prototype currently in evaluation. I am demonstrating the sound feedback provided by moving the tracked (vicon) markers and improvising with it. Please note the song used is the video is only for demonstration purposes, not aiming for any commercial gains.
This research is supervised by Assoc. Prof. Matthew Butler and Dr. Sarah Goodwin. Also, the system integration is collaboration with Jim Smiley. Interms of conducting user studies, Dr. Leona Holloway supported in this research.