Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Xixi Campus, Zhejiang University, Hang Zhou, People's Republic of China, 310028.
Behav Res Methods. 2018 Apr;50(2):518-529. doi: 10.3758/s13428-017-0883-9.
Biological motion (BM) is the movement of animate entities, which conveys rich social information. To obtain pure BM, researchers nowadays predominantly use point-light displays (PLDs), which depict BM through a set of light points (e.g., 12 points) placed at distinct joints of a moving human body. Most prevalent BM stimuli are created by state-of-the-art motion capture systems. Although these stimuli are highly precise, the motion capture system is expensive and bulky, and its process of constructing a PLD-based BM is time-consuming and complex. These factors impede the investigation of BM mechanisms. In this study, we propose a free Kinect-based biological motion capture (KBC) toolbox based on the Kinect Sensor 2.0 in C++. The KBC toolbox aims to help researchers acquire PLD-based BM in an easy, low-cost, and user-friendly way. We conducted three experiments to examine whether KBC-generated BM can genuinely reflect the processing characteristics of BM: (1) Is BM from this source processed globally in vision? (2) Does its BM (e.g., from the feet) retain detailed local information? and (3) Does the BM convey emotional information? We obtained positive results in response to all three questions. Therefore, we think that the KBC toolbox can be useful in generating BM for future research.
生物运动（BM）是有生命实体的运动，它传达了丰富的社会信息。为了获得纯生物运动，研究人员目前主要使用点光源显示（PLD），通过放置在运动人体的不同关节上的一组光点（例如 12 个点）来描绘生物运动。最常见的生物运动刺激是由最先进的运动捕捉系统创建的。虽然这些刺激非常精确，但运动捕捉系统昂贵且庞大，并且构建基于 PLD 的生物运动的过程既耗时又复杂。这些因素阻碍了对生物运动机制的研究。在这项研究中，我们提出了一个基于 C++的免费 Kinect 生物运动捕捉（KBC）工具箱，该工具箱基于 Kinect Sensor 2.0。KBC 工具箱旨在帮助研究人员以简单、低成本和用户友好的方式获取基于 PLD 的生物运动。我们进行了三项实验来检验 KBC 生成的生物运动是否真的反映了生物运动的处理特征：（1）这种来源的生物运动在视觉上是否是整体处理的？（2）它的生物运动（例如，来自脚部）是否保留了详细的局部信息？（3）生物运动是否传达了情感信息？我们对所有三个问题都得到了肯定的答案。因此，我们认为 KBC 工具箱可以在未来的研究中生成生物运动方面发挥作用。
