Value of Laban Movement Analysis for Interaction Design?

[Doug Fox]

In my Kinetic Interface blog, I'm very interested in the connection among dance, movement, and new body and movement-centric interfaces. I compiled a guide to videos of new interfaces that you can review.

I'm curious to what extent dancers and those trained in Laban Movement Analysis might contribute to the creation and analysis of new body and movement-based interfaces?

Along these lines, I came across a paper titled "Understanding Movement for Interaction Design: Frameworks and Approaches." (L Loke, AT Larssen, T Robertson and J Edwards, in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, vol. 11, no. 8, 2007, 691-702. You can read the paper in PDF format.

Here is the abstract:

"The results of a study of two computer games, that use human movement as direct input, were analysed using four existing frameworks and approaches, drawn from different disciplines that relate to interaction and movement. This enabled the exploration of the relationships between bodily actions and the corresponding responses from technology. Interaction analysis, two design frameworks and Laban movement analysis were chosen for their ability to provide different perspectives on human movement in interaction design. Each framework and approach provided a different, yet still useful, perspective to inform the design of movement-based interaction. Each allowed us to examine the interaction between the player and the game technology in quite distinctive ways. Each contributed insights that the others did not."

I would be curious what dance-tech community members think about the use of LMA in conjunction with the other frameworks used to analyze human movement as direct input in the context of the Sony EyeToy.

If you were conducting this or a similar study, what frameworks would you use?

If anybody knows of the application of movement analysis in a commercial setting, I would very much like to know about this work.

I look forward to your thoughts.