Dance Dance Revolution Ideas

| tags: blind, ideas, enabling technology

Current implementations of DDR specify steps the user must match exactly to score points. Someone recently introduced matching silhouettes but it is essentially the same thing. The step files are synchronized with the music using a simple offset and rate. Thus the music has to have a strictly fixed beat and (practically) has to be shipped with the game resulting in copyright issues.

How can we generalize DDR to enable blind kids to play? How about kids with limited movement?

  • Generalize the scoring in DDR based on the correlation of the movement with the music and the energy expended in the process. Correlation might be something as simple as pressing some button in time with the music or more sophisticated like pressing some pads for low notes and others for high notes. The estimate of energy might include the number of different pads used, and/or the distance between pads.
  • Process an ordinary mp3 (or other music represetation) to extract the instantaneous beat and other parameters for scoring.
  • Process web-cam video in real time to detect motion that is correlated with the music and to estimate the energy in the motion.
  • Guitar Hero is a great game that is almost identical to DDR except that you are participating in making the music. How can we use the making music hook to get people involved?