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BMLwalker: 15 simple dots
BMLwalker is a motion visualization demonstration from the Ruhr-University-Bochum BiomotionLab. The user can adjust the walking animation for gender, weight, dispostion and mood. If you move the slider all the way to the male side, for instance, you somehow see "maleness" in the cues provided by the way the 15 simple dots on a plain black background move in relation to each other. The animation can rotate 360 degrees and there is a setting that connects the dots with lines.
"This animation demonstrates a framework for retrieving and visualizing biologically and psychologically relevant information from biological motion patterns. It is based on walking data from 40 male and 40 female walkers. Using a motion capture system their movement were recorded while walking on a treadmill.
The data were subsequently transformed into a representation which allows for linear morphing. The resulting "walking space" was then transformed using principal component analysis. A space spanned by the first 10 eigenwalkers was used to compute linear disciminant functions for the respective attributes.
Sex and weight of each walker were directly available from our records. The other two attributes were derived from psychophysical experiments. A number of observers were presented with point-light displays of the 80 walkers. For each of them they had to rate the attributes nervous/relaxed and happy/sad on a scale of 7 steps.
Parts of the procedure are described in:Troje, N. F. (2002) Decomposing biological motion: A framework for the analysis and synthesis of human gait patterns. Journal of Vision 2:371-387."
[via nastystart]