“Push your front thigh backwards while lifting your heels in the direction of the hip,” said Elmo, an experienced Iyengar-yoga instructor, while closely observing my pose from behind a screen. Noting that I missed her point, she made another attempt, “Imagine now I am holding your heels and pushing them against the wall.” Beads of sweat formed on my brow as I closed my eyes and summoned attention and strength, hoping for the consciousness to awake.
During the pandemic, I turned to livestream yoga classes in a reluctant bid to keep up the regular practice. Now, all sports studios having long ago returned to business as usual, I remained a creature of habit and carried on my daily exercise in my comfort home. Not only because the professional Iyengar studios in Zurich are more than I could afford as a broke student, but saved commute time and a much more comprehensive range of choices made me strongly inclined to take online lessons. But the scenario above is where the rub is: I occasionally find it hard to fully appreciate the verbal instructions without the teacher demonstrating physically next to me. More often than not, I feel not reassured behind the screen and make limited attempts towards challenging poses, to avoid injury.
In the wake of A.I.’s rapid application success, it occurred to me that A.I.-aided yoga practice might soon come true. For example, a mirror senses and records the student’s poses and promptly provides appropriate feedback. It should detect, say, the alignment of the spine and hip as well as the stretch and contraction of muscles, like a sophisticated teacher does. Let us put aside the question of hardware design—because hardware is hard for me. The abundant training data, which include countless training videos and hundreds of books, and large models that can handle multimodalities, such as transformers, make me quite optimistic about the future trend.
Probably, I would have time and chances to work on this technology one day. For now, I will just do cat-assisted (or impeded) yoga practice.