Overlap of virtual entity on learner's body for fusing experience in learning body movements

Abstract

We propose a learning support system of body movements which functions by means of overlapping a virtual entity over the learner's body. Learning experience could be classified into two main types: direct experience and indirect one respectively. Direct experience is the experience which has a direct relationship with the explicitly given target behavior. On the other hand, the indirect experience does not require such a relationship with the target behavior. Complementing both types of experience could enhance learning, by combining the respective advantages of each of the learning types. The learner's target behavior in our work is the action based on imitation, via repeating the three phases of “understanding”, “practicing” and “confirming.” We intend to achieve fusing both types of experience by eliminating the gap between these steps. The proposed system generates a virtual avatar of the teacher which features spatial coordinates of the articulating points obtained via Microsoft Kinect, overlaid on the image of the learner. In our system, we achieved “fusion of understanding and practice”, “fusion of practice and confirming” and “higher order of understanding and confirming”.