Cancel that

After some coaching we got an approval for our concept. If we don't get the computer to recognize our moves that can be ok, as the investigation is the important part. We should analyze how these kind of moves and record how it looks when you regret a move and when you don't. We also have to try the moves and see how they feel for the mover.

We will move forward by prototyping these moves in different situations to se if we can identify the canceling and regret of movements. What does it look like when you are in the middle of a movement? Can the the machine recognize the hesitation? Can we isolate this cancelling movement? Movements that are stopped and regretted, can the machine recognize this?

We started looking at some different situations where one person would do something and one person would suddenly tell them to stop. The first was writing on a whiteboard. In this case we found that the canceling was done very subtly in between drawing the individual lines making up the letters. Stopping the writing action was not noticeable, if you don't account for the words not being completed. There was no twitch or anything that we could see.

The same was true for walking, we could not see the cancelling as a specific move. We concluded that this could be a consequence of theses actions really being an ongoing series of actions. When told to stop, people would stop before initiating the next "subaction".

When making more distinct actions we noticed more clear cancels. With the throwing we could see a difference when the mover knew the he would cancel. In this case he would cancel before getting into the swing. We also had some tests where you didn't know that you had to cancel. In this case we could see the swing being initialized and that the cancel could fail, in regards to holding on to the ball. Theses moves where more interesting from the mover perspective, with a heavy object being thrown, the cancellation can really be felt, it can even hurt. As the mover has to stop the swing or divert it, the energy has to be dispersed in another way, and this will be felt in the arm.

Smaller actions like picking things up is different again. Here we get further into the action and when we cancel we can see a twitch almost like we are being burned. We can also see a lot of hesitation, probably because we know it is an experiment. We can also se that at times we actually take the object and then release it. We call this regretting a move as we think it differs from cancelling.