Balletic VR: Integrating Art, Science, and Technology for Dance Science Education

Abstract

Art-integrated education has many positive impacts on various educational disciplines. In addition, teaching STEM in art related courses also benefits students with critical thinking. We present an art-integrated collaborative project for dance science education. This project aims to provide a Virtual Reality-based educational application, Balletic VR that can provide students with simulated 360 views of fundamental movements. It allows students to scrub through movements, rotate the virtual instructor, choose from several different dance options, and change the speed of the currently viewed dance movement. Motion capture was used to provide the initial data for fundamental dance positions, to portray these movements accurately. A “muscle mode” is also provided in the interface, highlighting key muscle groups used in specific dance positions and providing information about how they are being used and how to train such muscles to better enhance their ability. Through the iterative process, we experimented how artists, anatomists, dancers, virtual reality developers collaborate and succeed to create an environment that provides artistic and anatomical contents and experiences.