The ever increasing availability of high speed Internet access has led to a leap in technologies that support real-time realistic interaction between humans in online virtual environments. In the context of this work, we wish to realise the vision of an online dance studio where a dance class is to be provided by an expert dance teacher and to be delivered to online students via the web. In this paper we study some of the technical issues that need to be addressed in this challenging scenario. In particular, we describe an automatic dance analysis tool that would be used to evaluate a student's performance and provide him/her with meaningful feedback to aid improvement.

This work addresses the Huawei/3Dlife Grand challenge proposing a set of audio tools for a virtual dance-teaching assistant. These tools are meant to help the dance student develop a sense of rhythm to correctly synchronize his/her movements and steps to the musical timing of the choreographies to be executed. They consist of three main components, namely a music (beat) analysis module, a source separation and remastering module and a dance step segmentation module. These components enable to create augmented tutorial videos highlighting the rhythmic information using, for instance, a synthetic dance teacher voice, but also videos highlighting the steps executed by a student to help in the evaluation of his/her performance.

The Huawei/3DLife Grand Challenge Dataset provides multimodal recordings of Salsa dancing, consisting of audiovisual streams along with depth maps and inertial measurements. In this paper, we propose a system for augmented reality-based evaluations of Salsa dancer performances. An essential step for such a system is the automatic temporal synchronisation of the multiple modalities captured from different sensors, for which we propose efficient solutions. Furthermore, we contribute modules for the automatic analysis of dance performances and present an original software application, specifically designed for the evaluation scenario considered, which enables an enhanced dance visualisation experience, through the augmentation of the original media with the results of our automatic analyses.