Duet: VR Pair Dancing with Partner Movement Manipulation

Dancing provides a powerful way for one to feel connected with others. Virtual Reality (VR) holds the promise of enabling shared dancing experiences over a distance, but major challenges remain. First, the average VR user is limited to moving in a small real-world space; techniques that allow movement in a larger-than-real virtual space all have their limitations. Second, the lack of force feedback, combined with the latency of networking, movement tracking, graphics rendering, and human visuomotor control, makes it difficult to mimic physical interaction such as holding hands—one typically cannot react fast enough to one’s dance partner’s movements to maintain connection. Third, reliable full-body movement tracking remains beyond reach for affordable consumer VR devices such as Meta Quest. Here, we present a two-player VR contemporary dance game/experience that provides a new solution to these problems. Our solution combines 1) a novel partner movement manipulation approach where each player only needs a small physical space to move, but their perception of their partner’s movement is manipulated to allow the choreography to utilize a large virtual space, 2) a latency-tolerant visual metaphor for connection, in the form of an elastic string connecting the players, and 3) abstract avatar design that only requires tracking the movement of the hands and head and also increases the plausibility of the movement manipulation.