Background Research

I just got sent this interesting research paper, "TotalRecall: Visualization and Semi-Automatic Annotation of Very Large Audio-Visual Corpora." It's by the folks over at the MIT Media Lab. The reason why I thought the paper was interesting was not for the TotalRecall technology itself, but for one of the images within the paper.

After seeing this, I started thinking about how we can possibly visualize actors moving inside the motion capture area, since most motions aren't captured with the actor standing in one spot only. At this point, I still don't know if this visualization is entirely necessary, but it's something worthwhile to think about. Since parts of the image in the MIT paper looked like motion trails of some sort, that somehow led me to think about heat maps, which consequently led me to this Tracking Taxi Flow Across the City by the NYTimes Graphics Department. I thought that maybe we can apply the concept of heat maps to visualizing a short period of motion across a space.

However, we should still be able to see the actual motions themselves in some way. This paper showcases an interesting image, where you don't see frames at measured intervals, but you see frames when they are of importance in the motion.

What if we were to add a smooth curve connecting the root of the skeleton in each frame? This could showcase the change in y-position throughout the motion, which can be useful.

My sketches are below. Apologies if you can't read my handwriting. I would appreciate any thoughts/comments on these! They are very rudimentary as of now. Also, you'll notice the monitor behind the sheet of paper. I took the picture with my iPhone.