My Acting Pedigree

For a course project, a friend of mine built a Wii Gesture Classification system. The idea is that during game play, a user will perform actions with the Wiimote which have to be identified by the game and translated into actions by a game character. These actions have to be classified properly. For example, consider a baseball game in which a full swing needs to be distinguished from a bunt.

The difficulty with building such a system is that fact that there will be a significant amount of variation in the way different people will try to perform the same action. For example, people swing a baseball bat in many differenet ways, and even do so from different sides. Moreover, as different games will require different action sets to classify, it would be nice to have a system that could be re-used in multiple games without much effort.

My friend's system is trained through the use of examples. To do so, a number of people perform the desired actions. The system then attempts to generalize from these training examples to a more general idea of the actions. The resulting model is then used to classify actions by a game player.

This is all a long-winded way of getting to the point that it is a cool system, he made a demo movie of his software for the 2009 AAAI Video Competition, and I am in it. In the video, my friend shows the system classifying actions in real-time. Since I can't resist the allure of movie-making, I volunteered to be one of the test subjects.

Anyways, here is the video:


You can also find contact info if you are interested in the system at the following link: http://wiigesture.com/