3DANCE - Establishment of cutting-edge infrastructure for the technology-independent conservation of folk dances

The 3DANCE Norwegian-Hungarian dance conservation initiative will be launched by the Norwegian ambassador to Hungary on 9 November, 2012 at the Central Building of MTA SZTAKI.  A first test recording of folk dances based on modern 3D technology will take place at the launching ceremony.

The main goal of the 3DANCE cooperation initiated by MTA SZTAKI ( 3DICC Laboratory ), the MTA Institute for Musicology (Department of Folk Music and Folk Dance Research), the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Department of Music) and the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (Dept. of Telecommunications and Media Informatics) is to build the infrastructure that is necessary for the high-fidelity conservation of folk dances, and to use this infrastructure to create a database of Hungarian and Norwegian dances capable of storing high-resolution 4D motion capture data.

The information technology available in our research facilities has reached the level which can allow us to record each point of the human body as it moves through time, to fuse these points with realistic skeleton models and to recreate dance movements on-the-fly.  Thus, it is possible to establish an archive based on a timeless mathematical representation which will obviate the need to re-record dance movements as technology advances.  

Our plans also include the creation of an international platform that would make accessible the recorded dance movements to future ICT applications, including 3D Internet, Internet of Things as well as augmented/virtual reality communication and collaborative platforms.  Given the kind of timeless representation used in our backend database, various transformations (including re-positioning, scaling and rotations) could be effected on the models, which could be of great help in the design of realistic virtual avatars and other intelligent communication agents.  Further, a large variety of analytical tools could be developed based on the database, as potential applications for ethnocoreology, anthropology, ethnography, the performing arts, and the entertainment industry.