In a previous post, we talked about a project in which we were using the Kinect to track the motion of children and adults. We took the motion we captured and conducted an applied perception study, which we are pleased to announce has been accepted for publication into ACM Transactions on Applied Perception. Our paper, “Is the motion of a child perceivably different from the motion of an adult?” reports that indeed participants can successfully identify motion as belonging to a child or an adult, and discusses some possible cues participants may be using. This paper includes our project team: me (Dr. Lisa Anthony), first author Dr. Eakta Jain, and several of our current and former students: Aishat Aloba, Amanda Castonguay, Isabella Cuba, Alex Shaw, and Julia Woodward. The abstract of the paper is as follows:

Artists and animators have observed that children’s movements are quite different from adults performing the same action. Previous computer graphics research on human motion has primarily focused on adult motion. There are open questions as to how different child motion actually is, and whether the differences will actually impact animation and interaction. We report the first explicit study of the perception of child motion (ages 5 to 9 years old), compared to analogous adult motion. We used markerless motion capture to collect an exploratory corpus of child and adult motion, and conducted a perceptual study with point light displays to discover whether naive viewers could identify a motion as belonging to a child or an adult. We find that people are generally successful at this task. This work has implications for creating more engaging and realistic avatars for games, online social media, and animated videos and movies.

The camera-ready version of the paper is available here. We will get to present the paper at the upcoming ACM Symposium on Applied Perception. The conference is coming up in Anaheim, CA, in late July, co-located with ACM SIGGRAPH. Stay tuned for our presentation slides to be posted after the conference. See more information at our project website.