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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"
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.
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!".
Actually, if you RTFA, you'll see that they already address this. One of the difficulties with current systems is that you have to go to the system to do the motion capture. This new system could potentially be used on set - which would be very attractive in situations where live-action and CG are mixed.
There are many small and medium sized game development houses who would love an inexpensive motion capture system in order to capture data for things like in-game cut-scenes. And to them, yes, it makes a pretty big difference whether a system cost $1000 vs $100,000. Having to rent a studio by the hour is also pretty damned expensive.
Besides which, it seems foolish to offhandedly dismiss new technology such as this before it's had even a chance to develop into a useful product.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.