title: Creating stimuli for the study of biological-motion perception.
abstract: In the perception of biological motion, the stimulus information is confined to a small number of lights attached to the major joints of a moving person. Despite this drastic degradation of the stimulus information, the human visual apparatus organizes the swarm of moving dots into a vivid percept of a moving biological creature. Several techniques have been proposed to create point-light stimuli: placing dots at strategic locations on photographs or films, video recording a person with markers attached to the body, computer animation based on artificial synthesis, and computer animation based on motion-capture data. A description is given of the technique we are currently using in our laboratory to produce animated point-light figures. The technique is based on a combination of motion capture and three-dimensional animation software (Character Studio, Autodesk, Inc., 1998). Some of the advantages of our approach are that the same actions can be shown from any viewpoint, that point-light versions, as well as versions with a full-fleshed character, can be created of the same actions, and that point lights can indicate the center of a joint (thereby eliminating several disadvantages associated with other techniques).
authors.affiliation: University of Leuven, Tiensestraat 102, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium.
authors.forename: Mathias
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Dekeyser
authors.forename: Karl
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Verfaillie
authors.forename: Jan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Vanrie
mesh_terms: D001695:Biology; D006801:Humans; D009039:Motion Perception; D009068:Movement / Q000502:physiology*; D012984:Software; D014743:Videotape Recording