Trip the Light is a new VR game on Kickstarter that's now painfully close to meeting its target, and that's no surprise: It's one of the most innovative virtual reality projects I've come across in some time. It leverages the VR motion controllers and sensors to... teach players how to ballroom dance with someone else.
Yes:
TRIP THE LIGHT is a fully immersive dance game that brings the connection of partner dancing to life. Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned dancer, you can experience authentic salsa, swing, hip hop, and line dancing in stunning environments or in your own living room. Dance hand-in-hand with virtual AI partners and instructors in real time, learning techniques while unlocking new levels, dance styles, outfits, accessories and more. Perfect for fitness, fun, and improving your real life dance skills.
There's been a slew of club-style dancing video games, where the solo partners don't touch, but this must be the first that simulates true couples dancing. It's lead developed by Patrick Ascolese, a veteran of both VR and AAA games.
"My wife and I were at a wedding dancing together and at that moment I just knew," he tells me, about the moment of inspiration. "I have the technical skills to pull this off and just happen to be competent enough at salsa and partner dancing to lead it. As it moved along we enlisted the help of professional dancers / choreographers."
The game simulates touching and directly interacting with an NPC partner through a complex system that accounts for player motion and physics:
"All of the input is driven by the player," Patrick explains, "as if they were the lead in any partner dance. We have a system that takes all of the input from the player, combines it with the state of the dance and follower. For example what move is the follower doing, what is the current type of hold (open position, closed position etc), what is the average velocity over various body parts etc.
"We feed all of this into a system that can decide what the follower should do next, and use inverse kinematics and other animation tricks to make the hands and feet look right. Our system is flexible in that it can be 'plumbed' using AI / machine learning, physics, and regular old fashioned coding to determine what move is happening and how the dancer should I react."
If Trip the Light is successfully funded, the team has plans to add a multiplayer mode so you can actually dance with someone else online. ("The tricky part is that obviously two remote people can't physically affect each other. But we have some ideas on game mechanics that still be a lot of fun.")
And while they haven't yet done enough user tests to measure this, yes: Patrick says playing Trip the Light does help someone learn how to dance better with a partner in real life.
"Honestly the whole team has become more competent with the mechanics and if partner dancing by being so directly exposed to it," as he puts it. "I'd say our senior engineer has improved the most at actually dancing, particularly after he started working on developing moves for the game."
I believe it, because I fully credit playing Dance Dance Revolution for helping me become a pretty good dancer* in real life --- or at the very least, a much more confident one.
"I hope it helps people experience joy and feel something," Patrick tells me. "Dance is so visceral, it's built in, but many folks have reservations or are self conscious about trying. If we can give people a way to learn at home, privately, I think it could help people build the confidence to experience the connection of dancing."
Much more on the Kickstarter here. And credit to Irena Pereira for the tip.
* My wife vigorously disputes the "pretty good" assertion.
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