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Cheap 3D Motion Sensing System Developed At MIT
Al writes "Researchers at the MIT Media Lab have created a cheaper way to track physical motion that could prove useful for movie special effects. Normally an actor needs to wear special markers that reflect light with numerous high-speed cameras placed around a specially-lit set. The new system, called Second Skin, instead relies on tiny photosensors embedded in clothes that record movement by picking patterns of infrared light emitted by inexpensive projectors that can be mounted in ceilings or even outdoors. The whole system costs less than $1,000 to build, and the researchers have developed a version that vibrates to guide a person's arm movements. Watch a video of Second Skin in action."
The tracking fidelity from the video seems low. For movie work you need a very smooth input, otherwise you end up spending a lot of money to smooth out the positional data which has the side-effect of making it look more artificial and robot-like.
What I do like is the use of projected patterns to track individual dots, that's pretty clever. But it seems like this won't be the final solution. Ultimately we're going to need to perfect a micro-GPS system, and that has many more applications than just use as movement-capture for movie production.
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
because goodness knows in these troubling times, our society needs to concentrate our technological progress into the betterment of movie special effects, and a better cost structure for producers of action blockbusters.
When I saw the name of this, I immediately thought of Second Life.
Second Skin takes over Second Life!
Oh, the humanity! [or lack of...]
I bet the pr0n industry could have fun with this...
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Wii HD suit?
Here's a cookie... *psst* it's MAGIC
If the suit used to capture motion is not the standard black suit covered in little ping pong balls anymore, it's gonna make DVD "making of" extra features a lot less entertaining to watch.
Why use IR when it has proven time and time again to fail in 3D uses?
You can block IR with incredible ease, so much so that it probably happens a million times every day in IT by accident.
Give me some radio / wi-fi / wimax / bluetooth / similar.
Well, Bluetooth might not be that good either.
I actually presented a poster next to Ramesh Raskar at CHI earlier this month. While a very interesting project, he seemed to indicate that it was still very much a work in progress.
I regularly report MSN spam to the Hotmail admins.
researchers have developed a version that vibrates to guide a person's arm movements.
One word: autopilot.
(Ironically, my captcha was "females")
That since most of the cost resides in doing something useful with the data (completely producing the images), the time and talent of the people that are _in_ the suits, etc, the producers really don't give a frak that their motion capture system costs $1000, $15000 or even $100000. What they want is something that is proved to work, that technicians are familiar with, and that you can readily rent by the hour along with the facility it's located in. So thank you Media Lab for another useless gadget.
What's interesting to me is, this is almost exactly how the WiiMote works so cheaply!
A lot of people assume that the Wii's sensor bar actually senses, and that it can tell where the WiiMote is. But that ain't so. The sensor bar is just a pair of IR emitters. The front of the WiiMote is an IR camera. The thing you hold in your hand is looking at the external IR sources and using those to try and figure out where it is, and then telling that to the base system, almost exactly as is described in this article.
It's like someone said "hey, let's do motion capture by gluing WiiMotes all over a person's body!".
It's not about the Institute, it's about the people. Each and everyone of them has made significant contributions to their respective field: astronautics, semiconductors, etc. You may not know now what can be done with these technologies, but in the long run they will be vital for new processes you can benefit from. Just wait and see...
Parent's attention is fixed on the existing moviemaking structure and is not directed to alternative distribution and creation channels. Those alternative channels are the wave of he future. The cheaper production gets, the more opportunity we'll all have for a greater array of diverse movies.
Someday a truly independent movie is going to hit it big via reasonably independent internet distribution. That will change everything. Technology like this only makes that day closer to reality!
I say hurrah!
I thought the most valuable part of motion capture data was the actor's face, as it's the most difficult to simulate in CG. This is a neat system, especially for the price, but it doesn't provide the best feature of the original.
This system will probably be used on athletes, ninjas and commandos. From the video, it obviously only works on an arm without any muscle tone.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
It'll sure have a huge impact on movies being made by five friends with whatever effects they and their buddies can put together! Hack together your own mo-cap studio for a couple thousand, and the amount of stuff you can do goes way up.
Also:
egypt urnash minimal art.
$1000 of blister-healing goodness! And at 5000 fps!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2nd_Skin
It relies on cycling a repeating pattern from every projector 500 times/sec. Every pixel in the pattern encodes a unique symbol by the colors & the changes in the colors over time. By sensing what symbol hits each sensor, you know what pixel from the projector is hitting the sensor & what position on the projector's XY plane the sensor is in. If you know the XY plane position from 2 projectors, you can triangulate the sensor's 3D position, but projectors with enough resolution & bandwidth to do the job are expensive. $1000 would be for very low resolution.
So how do they keep the projected patterns in focus as the actor moves towards & away from the projectors? What if you want to track a close actor & a distant actor simultaneously? Those projected patterns aren't going to be in focus & the sensors won't know where they are.
...relies on tiny photosensors embedded in clothes... ...and the researchers have developed a version that vibrates...
Someone will work the system into porn and THEN we'll have a video game that is REALLY addictive!
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
They seem to use Gray code sequences (only one bit differs between to neighbouring codes). Johnny Chung Lee (the Wiimote Whiteboard guy) already demonstrated the use of structured light and optical fibers in his thesis. He used it to rapidly locate projection surfaces.
Combine Second Life and Second Skin with virtual reality "cave" technology and you have a low rent holodeck. Use it to interpret gestures like the Wii does, and yes, you have a revolution in cybersex and interactive pr0n.
I say it's a buy! Someone is going to make many millions on this. (Especially if they invent a Bluetooth API for optional teledildonics.)
I wonder if it was inspired by Johnny Lee's automatic projector calibration system (from 2003) which uses a very similar method. (Yes, that's the same guy that does the Wiimote hacks)
the Wiimote definitely [senses]. [...] [parent also implies that all Wii motion-sensing is done with IR and that isn't the case. The Wiimote has an accelerometer that can detect movement on 3 axes.
Keeping up with "your post doesn't contradict this", I want to add:
The accelerometers sense differential data (motion), whereas the IR camera senses static data (direction towards IR light).
If you assume that there are only two infrared sources out in the world (in either end of the sensor bar) and they don't move, you can use your camera reading to infer your angle in the horizontal plane as long as you can see the infrared sources. Using that, plus the strength of gravity at different points on the wiimote, you can compute its three-dimensional angle at any time.
If you knew your position at time t0 and all motion afterwards (but no IR camera information), you could in theory compute your position at all later times; in practice, due to the relatively low resolution (1 byte per accelerometer per (ISTR) 100hz sample), this doesn't work so well, so you need the IR camera.
There are commercial products (MVN from Xsens (former Moven)) that use inertial sensors and gyros to derive the motion. One of the advertised uses is the movie/digital effects industry.
Don't about the real performance of the technology but the idea in itself seems to enable some freedom (no need for interior studios, less expensive).