Dialect Study Applications and Kinect Motion Capture

This paper discuses my experience with the Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates (DREU) program this summer. I spent this past summer working in the ArticuLab at Carnegie Mellon University, under Professor Justine Cassell. I ended up working on two different projects this summer. For the first seven weeks of the summer, I worked on creating applications that were used in several user-studies the ArticuLab was conducting. Similar to my DREU experience last year, I was also able to participate in several pilot studies to get user feedback on these applications. The second project I worked on was implementing a Motion Capture system using a Microsoft Kinect and the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit (FAAST) that allows users to create Motion Capture animations for the ArticuLab’s Virtual Peer Alex. I also designed programs to walk users through how to create these animations and then automatically load them into the Alex software.