You'll Never Dance Alone with This Artificial Intelligence Project

Ph.D. student Mikhail Jacob demonstrates the technology by dancing with a virtual character. A new project from the Georgia Institute of Technology allows people to get jiggy with a computer-controlled dancer, which "watches" the person and improvises its own moves based on prior experiences. When the human responds, the computerized figure or "virtual character" reacts again, creating an impromptu dance couple based on artificial intelligence (AI). The LuminAI project is housed inside a 15-foot-tall geodesic dome, designed and constructed by Georgia Tech digital media master's student Jessica Anderson, and lined with custom-made projection panels for dome projection mapping. The surfaces allow people to watch their own shadowy avatar as it struts with a virtual character named VAI, which learns how to dance by paying attention to which moves the current user (and everyone before them) is doing and when.