How to write gestures and movements
Posted: February 20th, 2007 | 4 Comments »The coming of gestural interactions on mass market products such a the Wii brings lots of question about how to design movements, how to express them and discuss their relevance. This question is of particular importance in the video game industry and there is currently lots of discussion about how to create gestural grammar/vocabularies. I’ve attended seminars about people try to describe the movements (both the physical movements and their translation in the virtual counterpart) and there has not been any satisfactory solutions.
Reading a newspaper, I stumbled across this exhibit called “Les écritures du mouvements” (i.e. The writings of movements) in Paris that presents the different notation systems used in dancing and it seems strikingly pertinent for explaining movements. As described on this website about the show, each notation system attest of the peculiar way to perceive movements, which also depends on the historical, scientific and cultural context of the society in which this system occur. These systems are used either as mnemonic helps but also as a way to train people or even to create. Historically, there has been lots of different systems such as the ones represented below (left: by Bagouet, right: by Zorn):
The most common today are the Laban’s system and Benesh’s system. Below is an example of Laban:
Of course,t here are tools that allows to use these annotations: see for example Benesh Notation Editor or Credo.
Why do I blog this? This sort of notation systems seems interesting and pertinent for describing gestural interactions. Might have to dig this more deeply. Will wee see superb game design documentations with pages showing this sort of depictions?
A colleague of mine at the University of Technology in Sydney is using Laban notation for designing and understanding movement-based interaction. Her name is Lian Loke and “lian loke laban” will get you a few of her papers.
awesome, thanks Ben!
I have been thinking and writing about these issues for some time as well. Thanks for your links and here are some of mine:
Gesture Synthesis
Laban Movement Analysis.
I do not believe Labanotation is intended or sufficient to capture gestures (or sign language). I have higher hopes of sign language phonology (for example by Els van der Kooij) being applicable to everyday gestures as well. But that concerns ‘real’ gestures in 3d, not the writing gestures on a touchscreen.
In such touch gestures, as in the iPhone, we may however see the same sort of variation and invariables occurring as in regular gesturing. Parameters change, but mechanisms remain?
Just thinking out loud here, sorry if it is not very coherent.
here’s a couple more for you :
http://notation.free.fr/laban/theorie/lecon1_1.html
http://notation.free.fr/benesh/theorie/lecon1_1.html
though it’s in french (which i can’t understand), the site well organized so navigation is fairly self explanatory — i found the clips to be far more illustrative than the verbal descriptions available elsewhere…
-t
ps: mr tufte also touched on the topic in his book envisioning information (where i first discovered movement notation systems) so his site may be a fertile resource to explore, though i’m not certain…