IEEE VR 2025 Haptic Dance: Automatic Generation of Haptic Motion Effects Expressing Human Dance

Watching a dance performance engages your eyes and ears—but what if you could also feel the dancer's movements? This paper presents algorithms that automatically convert motion capture data from human dance into haptic feedback, letting viewers physically experience the performer's movements through vibrotactile devices. The approach cleverly separates external movements (the dancer traveling through space) from internal movements (limb gestures and body rotations), processing each optimally for haptic rendering. Internal movements are decomposed into segments to maximize clarity and expressiveness, then all components are merged with appropriate scaling and weights. The result is a system that can take any dance motion capture and automatically generate compelling haptic effects—no manual authoring required. This opens new possibilities for immersive dance experiences in VR and beyond.

Jaehyeok Ahn and Seungmoon Choi. 2025. Automatic Generation of Haptic Motion Effects Expressing Human Dance. In 2025 IEEE Conference Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), Saint Malo, France. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/VR59515.2025.00058