Sketches

So this past week, I did some sketches for possible visualizations. Some of them might be a little out there, and some others might be more feasible.

Sketch 1:

The idea for this visualization is that you have a skeleton shown at Frame 1, and its major joints are labeled with dots. So in order to prevent showing many skeletons at various frames, you instead plot the joint position at a frame and connect it to the joint position at the previous frame to create a kind of continuous line of motion. This hopefully makes it easier to see which body parts move the most, and which stay stagnant. Of course, my drawing is super bad and I did it by random, so we'll actually have to load a motion into it to see how it looks. Another idea was that if you were to hover over any part of the group of lines, you could see what the skeleton looks like at that particular frame. Perhaps, if it scales well, you can also choose to view it from the front/back, which could present a very different view.

Sketch 2:

This sketch is mainly for the skeleton (ie, what to display at a given frame). The idea was to place arrows indicating direction of movement at each of the major joints, and the direction would be determined by the difference in position between this frame and the next frame. Problem: the arrows might appear visually cluttered though, so they would have to be thin and lightly colored. There are various ways to display the arrows (length, shape, opacity, width) so that they don't appear as intrusive. Maybe the skeleton could take a back seat and let the arrows be the focus.

Sketch 3:

This is just your typical frame-by-frame display of motion. Standard.

Sketch 4:

This concerns the skeleton as well. Maybe for each frame, we can highlight the parts of the body that see the most motion, or the part of the body whose position changes from the previous frame to this frame. The highlights could also be on a spectrum: lighter color = less movement, darker color = more movement. These skeletons can be displayed side by side (like in Sketch 3).

Sketch 5:

Now this one is more of an overlay of skeletons at each frame (or intervals of frames). Each skeleton would be translucent so you can see which body parts stay in the same place (indicated by a darker color), or which body parts move around more (indicated by lighter colors). The idea is to make this look like a slowed down motion clip, where you see traces of the frames before. Onion skinning, is that the term?

Sketch 6:

This is another way of displaying the skeleton per frame. Instead of seeing the skeleton as a whole, maybe someone would like to focus on a specific body part, say the legs. For each frame displayed, we could either show just the legs (resulting in a really weird torso-less body), or we can show the whole skeleton with with the rest of the body in a light color, and the legs in a dark color. This allows you to focus on the body part that concerns you. For example, if you're searching for motion capture data of an Irish dancer, then you probably would want to see movements of the legs and not the upper body, since the upper body stays still most of the time anyways.

So for next week, my plans are to:

• Iterate on these sketches
• Start sketching the website (results page) layout
• Look at the asf/amc parser code that Joe will hopefully send me!