Just Dance Score Predictor

Value Proposition

Have you ever struggled to "get your groove on"?

Want the ability to practice your Just Dance moves without the console?

Some of us were born with Michael Jackson flowing through our veins, and some of us just have two left feet.

The Just Dance game series provides opportunities to learn choreographed sequences to many popular songs.

Unfortunately, there's no easy way to practice those moves without a video game console at hand... until now!

With our Just Dance score predictor, you can practice your favorite songs on the go and test your performance by running your accelerometer data through our algorithm.

The Game

We played the hit Wii game Just Dance 3, a dancing game where players score points by accurately following dancers on a screen. The game determines how closely a player follows the moves based on data it receives from the Wii remote, which is in the player's right hand.

We analyzed a few specific songs that varied in both technical difficulty and physical exertion, two metrics that the game provides to players. Both scales are from 1-3, with 1 being the least difficult/physically intensive and 3 being the most difficult/intense.

To narrow our analysis and to simplify our score predictor, we focused on the song Take On Me by A-ha.

Scoring in Just Dance is both numerical and symbolic; for every 2,000 points earned in a song, the player earns a star. A "perfect" score is a score upwards of 10,000 points, or 5 stars (⭐).

Data Collection

To collect data, we played Just Dance 3 with the Wii remote in the right hand and an iPhone in the left. This way we were able to collect accelerometer data while obtaining playing the game. Below is a sample from the song Take On Me by A-ha.

Demo courtesy of Elias Gabriel.

Analysis

We calculated the signal coherence between given accelerator data on our phone's x, y, and z axes and predefined data for a known well-scoring trial run. Using the average coherence across all three movement axes, we used simple linear regression to form a function that predicts a score given a sample of data.

Results

Our current algorithm is able to predict your Just Dance 3 score to within 2000 points. While not numerically precise, this range still allows us to somewhat accurately predict the rank of your play-through on the game's range of 0-5 stars (⭐).