Weight, weight, don't tell me

Remember the "Internet's firstborn," Ron Lussier's dancing baby from 1996? Other than a vague sense of repeated gyrations, no one can recall any of the movements in particular. Why is that? While that animation was ground-breaking in many respects, to paraphrase a great writer, there was no there there. The dancing baby lacked personality because the movements themselves lacked "weight." Each human being has a unique perceivable movement style composed of repeated recognizable elements that in combination and phrasing capture the liveliness of movement. The use of weight, or "effort quality," is a key element in movement style, defining a dynamic expressive range. In computer representation of human movement, however, weight is often an aspect of life-ness that gets diminished or lost in the process, contributing to a lack of groundedness, personality, and verisimilitude. In this talk, I unpack the idea of effort quality and describe current work with motion capture and telematics that puts the weight back on interface design.