Establishing Rapport with a Virtual Dancer

We discuss an embodied agent that acts as a dancer and invites human partners to dance with her. The dancer has a repertoire of gestures and moves obtained from inverse kinematics and motion capturing that can be combined in order to dance both on the beat of the music that is provided to the dancer and sensor input (visual and dance pad) from a human partner made available to the virtual dancer. The interaction between virtual dancer and human dancer allows alternating ‘lead’ ad ‘follow’ behavior, both from the point of view of the virtual and the human dancer