Week 11 Bouncing Back – Apr 7th, 2023
In the last week, we just finished conducting our largest playtest during Playtest Day. For the remainder of the week, we focused on iterating upon the feedback received during playtesting from our various users and improving the experience as a whole.
One of the major decisions we made this week was acknowledging that we had reached the limits of programmatically animating our 3D model. The MediaPipe model we were using was known to already have some issues in converting from 2D to real-world position points; although their most recent version is not as extreme, the model still has great difficulty in identifying the depth of a model, causing our animation to often tilt or morph in an attempt to hit the nonsensical z-axis coordinate. Additionally, due to the ambiguity of converting from 3D coordinates to joint rotation values, many of the positions outputted by our algorithm would cause significant deformations in our 3D model.
Visible deformations in the model animation caused by inaccurate z-axis measurements
As both of these limitations prevent us from having an accurate 3D animation teaching the dance, we made the difficult decision to instead pivot into exporting the animation into an FBX file to be manually tweaked in Maya.
Outside of this major issue, we focused on making UX improvements based on the feedback and observations from Playtest Day. Some of these included:
- Updating next pose UI to encourage follow-through on motions
- Adjusting the speed of levels 2 & 3 to be more doable by non-dancers
- Including Paul Taylor’s composed music as BGM
- Adding in more of the arrow/line indicators to assist with teaching points of tension and motion
New environment with modeled character