The emperor's new suit
Back in the day, when Kevin Alderman (Second Life's Stroker Serpentine) was selling his hugely successful and popular virtual Amsterdam setting, he hinted that he was moving into a related line of business. Well, we know now what business it is that he's been getting into: wearable, affordable, consumer-grade motion-capture suits.
Frankly, the expensive professional capture systems that have largely been de-rigueur for motion capture for most of the history of the art require a ton of space, huge amounts of computing power, and that you dress like a luge sled pilot that's been infected with evil-alien-mime DNA and is being assaulted by amorous Pythagorean solids. Those days are soon to be over.
Alderman's company Strocap is working on a simple, wireless, wearable motion-capture suit that doesn't make you look any more retarded than the average outfit of expensive athletic gear. You can wear this with regular clothing -- or without it, depending on just exactly what sorts of motions you want to capture.
Alderman's hoping to have his suits in broad commercial release by 2009, when an estimated one million animators, largely in small studios will be looking for affordable motion-capture solutions that lack the drawbacks of past systems.
To be honest we could walk down the street wearing one of these, and get no stranger looks than we already do. Plus, if we stay in wireless range, we'd get some nice animation files out of it.
It also has possibilities as a human-computer interface, we think, since it would take the uncertainty out of a camera guessing where your limbs are. We'd like to know if tracking finger motions with it is possible too.
In the 3D virtual worlds market at the moment and for small digital film-makers, this has an enormous amount of potential. Maybe even some of that old avatar-puppeteering magic might get pulled out and dusted off. Who knows?
