So why do people use it? Well, for one thing, few software products are marketed to the dance world. Secondly, we are all starving for a technical solution to our biggest challenges. Some among us are very dedicated, patient, and even 'trend setting' and thus gravitate towards Life Forms.

Writers have had word processors for at least two decades, engineers have CAD packages, musicians have 'scores' of electronic recording, production and composition tools, and visual artists are also nicely supported by technology. Sometimes it seems like technology grew up and forgot about dance.

What is Life Forms? Basically it is a software program that draws wire-framed and wire-hooped figures on screen that are roughly human shaped. The figures appear to be three-dimensional and can be placed in and animated within a virtual room on your PC monitor.

The thought is that if you have vaguely human shapes that can follow some sort of a movement script then you can use the system to describe complex movement, like a dance.

If I don't pull any punches, Life Forms is little more than a very unstable, wireframe rendering, key frame animator. Strange how dance isn't in that description at all.  This is the kind of product that I'd expect to see created as part of a thesis in college, in part because so little attention has been spent on the human factors components of the product and because the the technology is at least a decade old.

Where does Life Forms fall short? Thought you'd never ask:

1) No underlying physics model. There is no gravity, no mass, no acceleration, inertia or momentum, no friction, no pressure, no up or down in this virtual world.  A skilled animator can fake some of these effects and constraints but we want to create dance, not work for Disney.

2) No collision detection. A Life Forms figure is a ghost -- his hand can pass through his chest, his feet don't feel or use the floor, he walks straight through his partners and props. To do anything different requires considerable time to manually check for and correct each and every interaction within the body itself and with other objects and figures in the room. Imagine creating a pas de duex for two ghosts and you get the picture.

If word processors behaved like this all the letters and words you type would pile up in a little box on the screen. Then you'd need to drag each word out into the proper place on the document.

3) Nonexistent representation of true human form. Dance enlists the use of nearly every bone and muscle in the body. We need a library of realistic body types, with typical and exceptional mobility ranges, correctly proportioned, and fully articulated. Life Forms has paddles for feet yet every ballet class stresses rolling through the feet, pointing, and brushing; fingers complete the line and add expression; and the face is fundamentally important to the finished work, unless you are using this product.

5) The idea behind key frames is that you don't need to build and position every frame, just the important ones where the motion of a object changes. For example, you show the beginning and ending position of an arm swinging through an arc using two key frames. Supposedly the system will figure out how to get the arm from point A to point B. Will the arm stay turned out and move with the right line, acceleration, and bend of the elbow? When it falls short you add more key frames as check points. Big deal? Basically you have to teach Life Forms how to move. It doesn't learn and you will be starting from scratch far more often than you'd like.

6) Controlling, instructing, and positioning the Life Forms dancer is about as rewarding as teaching a cat to dance via telephone. Slow, frustrating, and awkward this tool will quickly sap the creative energy of most users.

he National Initiative to Preserve America's Dance (NIPAD) is trying to address some of these deficiencies with a $120,000 grant to Dance Notation Bureau of NY "to create a technological interface tool between LabanWriter, a word processing-like program for dance notation, and Life Forms, an animation program created for choreographers to plan and visualize a dance."

NIPAD's interest and commitment is to be commended, no doubt. But this is good money being thrown at the wrong project. Frankly NIPAD's chances of being involved with and enabling a true solution are next to zero, given the short sighted selection process used in their Grant Program.

You see, NIPAD will only make grants to incorporated nonprofit organizations that are at least 5 years old. Lord knows, perhaps there really is a team of leading 3D software developers just counting the days before they get to spend a grueling year working essentially for free. I don't think so. If NIPAD wants results they'll need to learn to identify the correct technology, the correct talent, and realize that the commercial software industry is the best place to make it all happen. Sure, they'll spend ten times as much, but do we want to get serious about this or no?