McAleer and Pollick’s actor videos

Phil McAleer and Frank Pollick used a pair of human actors — dressed in white bodysuits head to toe — to create videos of the same action type-pairs as Barrett, Blythe, Todd, and Miller did with ant animations. And they captured them from both the overhead view and a side view, using a pair of cameras running simultaneously.

Samples of the McAleer-Pollick videos are available on their site. They’ve generously shared the original video with this site. Originally, there was one recording of all actions from the overhead view, and another recording of all actions from the side view. Multiple instances of each action type-pair were recorded, and these aren’t always contiguous in the originals, so we’ve split the originals so we could organize them in a table:

Overhead View
  • Side View
Chasing / Fleeing (video) (annotation) 12 instances
Courting / Being-courted not found in original recordings
Fighting / Fighting (video) (annotation) 7 instances
Invading / Guarding (video) (annotation) 12 instances
Leading / Following (video) (annotation) 12 instances
Playing / Playing (video) (annotation) 12 instances

We are preparing source code that generates measurements of relative velocity, etc between the actors. The measurements should be similar to what McAleer and Pollick collected from the same videos, although those measurements are lost except for the ones reported in their papers. That source code, and a spreadsheet of measurements for each instance, will be added here later.

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