Movea hopes to market its MotionPod sensors to sports engineers and the film industry initially, before turning to the games industry and makers of consumer devices.
Traditional full-body motion capture typically uses dots or balls attached to a suit worn by actors with cameras capturing their movement. This efficient but costly system requires a fully equipped motion-capture room, experienced users and sophisticated programs to convert this into usable information for controlling computer avatars.
Meanwhile, video-based devices, namely Microsoft’s Kinect, have allowed full-body motion capture without the need for peripheral sensors. Yanis Caritu, co-founder of Movea, admitted that Kinect provides ease-of-use, but said there are limitations.
‘The problem is, you are confined into a very limited space because of the field of view of the camera; you have to stay inside a band. Also, it has difficulty with several players,’ he told The Engineer.
MotionPod incorporates a three-axis accelerometer, a three-axis gyroscope and a three-axis magnetometer with integrated software and a 2.4GHz wireless transmitter with range of up to 30m to a USB receiver.
Up to five MotionPods mounted on a bracelet or strap are placed on the body at strategic points to form a ‘body area network’, which enables detailed motion to be captured in real time with dynamic accuracy of just one degree — making it attractive to sports scientists, Caritu claimed.
The MotionPod system may also allow gesture recognition by comparing real-time motion data against a library of moves, such as those used in yoga or martial arts.
Click here for an appraisal of Kinect by a team of sports engineers from Sheffield Hallam University.
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