Learning How
To Dance Using AI

I won at Hack The North 2021 with two of my high school friends. We had always been fascinated with the rise of popular dances springing from TikTok and other parts of the internet. They inform a lot of our modern culture and unite everyone through a language as old and gold as any, dancing. The obvious question we had to ask ourselves is what would it take to use our skills as programmers to contribute to this culture of our generation. So we set out to answer the question: Can you dance as well as Addison Rae?

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We built Smart Dance, an app that gamifies learning how to dance using AI. Smart Dance uses pose estimation to store the key points of dances from popular dance videos and use those poses to guide the user on how to move their body to do the dance. Through our app's homepage, users can find trending dances and learn or assess how well they're dancing when compared to their friends or internet stars. The score function we've made allows users to determine whether their pose is similar or different to the videos they are dancing along with. This makes dancing (and learning to dance) much more engaging as well as opens the door to the gamification of dancing with real-time feedback and encouragement (much like how the classic dance arcade games used to work). The only difference is our solution is not just enjoyable but is portable, easy to play and can be integrated with a lot more going forward!