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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 video on the SecondSkin web site says it captures 5000 frames per second. I think the slowness you perceived in the feedback video was due to the feedback software, not the capture system.
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!".