Carousel Dancing

Social online dancing and partying with digital characters

With the support of novel, original and imaginative combinations of Artificial Intelligence and immersive interaction technologies, people will be able to feel each other’s presence, touch, and movement, even if they are not in the same physical space.

Meaningful AI-driven digital characters able to interact autonomously with people will help the individuals to feel happy and dance with each other.

The concept

Fresh news

Filter by :

• All categories
• Articles
• Events
• Press

Articles

Great article in Horizon the EU Research & Innovation Magazine

Read the article Articles

Carousel presents to the gaming industry at DevCom

Read the article Articles

Carousel is at Gamescom!!!

Read the article Articles

Soo excited to meet you all at Medica 2023

Read the article Articles

VRChat dance communities: “Bringing some love back in the world”

Read the article Articles

Great enjoyment to be at the XR-Week this week

Read the article Articles

Dancers of VRChat BOF at Siggraph 2022

Read the article Articles

Human Social and Interactive #IA in ActuIA N°8

Read the article Articles

Vibing Together: Dance Experiences in Social Virtual Reality

Read the article Articles

Presentation of paper at I3D Symposium

Read the article Articles

The “Plantworld” a VR world for feeling good and connected.

Read the article Articles

Finally the consortium met in-person in Saarbrücken

Read the article Articles

Digital AI powered characters do not get tired yet!

Read the article Articles

October 21, 2021 AI4EU cafe presentations on Embodied Online Dancing and Partying

Read the article Articles

Meet our researchers and hear about our work in October 21 AI4EU Café session.

Read the article Articles, Jobs

Carousel is Hiring : PhD Studentship at Napier University

Read the article Articles

Carousel is on ResearchGate

Read the article Articles

Carousel will organize a BoF session on “Dancing in XR” at ACM Siggraph 2021

Read the article Articles

Carousel will use UCL’s UBIQ networking library for low latency interaction between dancers.

Read the article Articles

Presentation of study on evaluating social experience in virtual reality at CHI 2021.

Read the article Articles

Carousel featured in 2021 first semester issue of DFKI newsletter.

Read the article Articles

Carousel is Hiring!

Read the article Articles

Presentation at IEEE VR 2021 Kelvar workshop published on youtube channel.

Read the article Articles

Carousel in the News : Article on Fetfx.eu portal.

Read the article Articles

Project KickOff meeting on January 15th 2021

Read the article Articles

Carousel in the news : CAROUSEL pushes the limits of digital communications

Read the article Load more

Twitter feed

[fts_twitter twitter_name=CarouselDancing tweets_count=1 cover_photo=no stats_bar=no show_retweets=yes show_replies=yes] Read more...

Youtube channel

Follow us :

• Twitter
• Linkedin
• Youtube
• Instagram
• Discord
• ResearchGate

Concept

01 02 03 04 05 06 /06

1. Internet today : the disembodied digital experience

The Internet connects individuals to the world and to other people by means of virtual social networks. However, the online experience is mostly passive, disconnected and disembodied. Internet users are patently part of the digital world, but often isolated from real-world sensations and feelings such as the presence of others, their touch, or their movement. We find ourselves isolated, instead of brought together, by the very technologies that are designed to connect us.

2. Our aim : Improve the Internet with feelings and emotions

CAROUSEL has the vision that, with the support of novel, original and imaginative combinations of Artificial Intelligence and immersive interaction technologies, people will be able to feel each other’s presence, touch, and movement, even if they are physically disconnected. These new developments will help overcome isolation and loneliness and bring improvements to our health, work, and wellbeing. Moreover, they will also generate the foundations for an ecosystem of original, as yet unimagined forms of communication and expression.

3. Carousel concentrates on dancing, as "The best things happen while you are dancing"

In CAROUSEL we have chosen dance as vehicle to implement our vision. Because dance is a profoundly human activity; we dance when we are in love, we show we are happy with dance, sharing a dance with someone creates a deep connection. By combining thinking, feeling, sensing with physical movement, Dance generates powerful positive effects on physiological and psychological well-being.

Our studies include modern freeform dance styles in groups and in pairs, folk dances, and partner dances such as tango. Scientifically and technically, we believe dance presents a special challenge due to the complex dependency between the motions, the music, the tactile contact and the dancers’ feelings and sensations.

4. Dancing alone or in groups with AI-driven characters able to interact autonomously with people

A person may feel lonely or isolated if they find themselves with nobody to contact, temporary confined, in pandemic quarantine or lockdown conditions. This person may open an interaction with a digital character and start dancing together; other real people may decide to join. In live events an icebreaker, for example from a group animator, an inspiring dancer, musician, moderator, trainer, or companion is often needed to kick-start the interaction. We imagine that an autonomous digital character will be able to play this role in the future. This is precisely the technical CAROUSEL breakthrough: to create AI-driven characters who will be able to interact autonomously with a single person or a group of people in a meaningful way and the people can feel and dance with each other even if they are physically not in the same space!

5. Carousel is a Human-centric research project conducted by a multidisciplinary team

The core of the CAROUSEL research is the experimentation with humans. The project involves partners from technical, scientific, social science, innovation, and artistic backgrounds from the outset. Our research will study the main senses involved in dancing: Audio, Vision, Haptics, to develop technology for human interaction and intelligent simulation and control of physically plausible digital characters.

6. "Real-World Social and Physical AI" for an internet of feelings and emotions And beyond…

The innovation perspective of this new branch of “Real-World Social and Physical AI” is tremendous as it has countless applications, requiring meaningful physical and social interaction. In particular, in the future, digital characters may act as physical trainers, dancers, entertainers, actors, coworkers, health assistants, guides, educators, spectators, physical therapists and companions. Beyond social, entertainment, health and educational applications, CAROUSEL’s insights on body language and group dynamics may be deployed in many other areas, including security, peace-making, emergency handling and autonomous driving.

01 02 03 04 05 06 /06

Consortium

The project is coordinated by Deutsche Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI)s with the participation of Edinburgh Napier University, Aalto University, Grassroots Arts and Research and VIVITnet.

Linkedin

Pieter Van Der Linden

VIVITnet S.A.S

Many years after having concentrated on graphics and speech as a researcher in man machine interaction at “Centre Mondial pour L’informatique et les Ressources Humaines”, I am with Carousel very happy to go way beyond working with human feelings, musical rhythm and creative expression.

Linkedin

Carmen Mac Williams

Grassroots Arts and Research

She is the Project Manager of CAROUSEL and the Director of the company Grassroots Arts and Research in Cologne, Germany. Grassroots Arts is a spin off company from the Academy of Media Arts (KHM) and is a media research company. Carmen is the driving force behind CAROUSEL+ and she brought her creative vision to the project. She invited the members of the consortium to come together as a team to realize CAROUSEL’s vision and she is excited to lead as Project Manager the concept and use case design and participate in the test pilots.

Linkedin

Philipp Slussalek

DFKI

Enabling to realistically interact in a physical way with a remote person or a virtual character in real-time is a huge scientific challenge but also highly motivating for the entire Carousel team to make it work for everyone.

Linkedin

Monica Tamariz

Edinburgh Napier University

Monica Tamariz is an Associate Professor in Psychology at Heriot-Watt University interested in the development and evolution of communication systems. She is also a dancer and teacher of Argentine tango. Within CAROUSEL+ she hopes to test the communicative affordances of the tactile channel in partner dance and beyond, and to explore how dancing remotely can promote joy.

Linkedin

Jessie Kennedy

Edinburgh Napier University

Professor Jessie Kennedy, Emeritus Professor in Computing.

Linkedin

Oliver Keller

DFKI Linkedin

Elisa Mekler

Aalto University

I’m assistant professor at the Aalto University Department of Computer Science, where I investigate how interactive systems can support more aesthetic and meaningful user experiences. I’m excited to apply theories and methods from motivational psychology and empirical aesthetics to capture the powerful social experiences CAROUSEL+ technology will afford.

Linkedin

Kenny Mitchel

Edinburgh Napier University

Kenny Mitchell is a Technical Director of Rendering at Roblox and chair of Video Game Technology at Edinburgh Napier University providing practical immersive media technology solutions with over 40 patents and 100+ peer reviewed technical papers. He is also co-founder/CTO of 3FINERY Ltd a spinout of Edinburgh Napier University bringing real world objects to life and CTO/non-executive Director of Cobra Simulation advising immersive technology products.

Linkedin

Erik Herrmann

DFKI

Erik Herrmann is a researcher in the Agents and Simulated Reality group at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Saarbrücken, Germany and a PhD candidate at the Department of Computer Science at Saarland University. His research interests include human animation synthesis and deep reinforcement learning. He is excited to join the Carousel project with the goal to develop contact aware agents for social VR applications.

Linkedin

Babis Koniaris

Edinburgh Napier University

I’m a Lecturer in Games and Software Engineering at Edinburgh Napier University, with a strong interest in real-time graphics and immersive VR. CAROUSEL is an exciting and challenging project as it aims to enable social and connected immersive experiences facilitated by multi-sensory time-sensitive high-performance data communication.

Linkedin

Noshaba Cheema

Max Planck Institute for Informatics

Noshaba is a researcher in the Simulated Agents and Reality group at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), and a PhD candidate at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics and the department of Computer Science at Saarland University.

Among other subjects her research interests include machine learning for animation, games, vision and graphics.

In Carousel she is excited to make AI agents understand humans, other AIs, the environment and exhibit creative and autotelic behaviour. She is also a dancer and aerialist herself.

Linkedin

Iain McGregor

Edinburgh Napier University

Dr Iain McGregor conducts research into listeners’ experiences of linear and interactive media.  Carousel provides the opportunity to explore the sonic requirements for dancers in terms of their own avatars, as well as their partners, shared acoustic environments, and the pertinent aspects of the music that they are dancing to.  What they attend to will change as the familiarity with the technologies, partners and dances evolves, and any system will require to provide these cues seamlessly.

Linkedin

Rene Vogels

Grassroots Arts and Research

Rene is a M.Sc. student in Media Technologies with focus on Augmented and Virtual Reality at  University of Applied Sciences of Cologne.

His research interests include Immersive VR, Virtual Embodiment, Interaction Design and Human-Computer-Interaction in VR.

Rene is thrilled to join Carousel to contribute to designing and developing social VR experiences for bringing together people around the world and making them feel  good.

Linkedin

Steven McSeveney

Edinburgh Napier University

Steven is a sound designer, specialising in video games, and a PhD candidate at Edinburgh Napier University.

His research interests include accessibility through sound design, procedural sound synthesis, and psychoacoustics within interactive media.

His goal within CAROUSEL is to create immersive interactive audio systems which enhance user presence in VR environments.

Linkedin

Adeyemi Ademola

Edinburgh Napier University

Adeyemi is a researcher and Phd Candidate at Edinburgh Napier University.

In particular, his interest goes towards deploying AI on edge computing devices.

Adeyemi is excited to be part of the carousel project where his ambition is to reduce latency between remote dancers by using trained Convolutional Neural Networks(CNN)

Linkedin

Han Du

DFKI

Han Du is a researcher in Agent and Simulated Reality group at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Saarbrücken, Germany.

His research interests include data-driven human motion modeling and synthesis.

Han is excited to join the Carousel project with the goal to create dancing animation for virtual avatars with rich variations and styles.

Linkedin

Stefan Grünvogel

Grassroots Arts and Research

Stefan is Professor for Computer Animation at TH Köln – University of Applied Sciences. He is fascinated by the idea of making people dance by means of virtual or augmented reality and is excited to explore the many technological questions that arise from it.

Linkedin

LLogari Casas

Edinburgh Napier University

Llogari Casas holds a Ph.D. in Augmented Reality and has an extensive background in Web & iOS Development. He previously undertook a 12-month long internship at Disney Research Los Angeles, won a prestigious 36-month long EU Marie Curie Fellowship and a Doctoral Consortium place at ACM SIGGRAPH Asia. He is currently the CEO of 3FINERY LTD, a spin-out of Edinburgh Napier University that offers a novel Augmented Reality solution by bringing real-world objects to life on mobile devices.