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100 years of motion-capture technology
Modern motion-capture systems are the product of a century of tinkering, innovation and computational advances. Mocap was born a lifetime before Gollum hit the big screen in The Lord of the Rings, and ages before the Cold War, Vietnam War or World War II. It was 1915, in the midst of the First World War, when animator Max Fleischer developed a technique called rotoscoping and laid the foundation for today's cutting-edge mocap technology. Rotoscoping was a primitive and time-consuming process, but it was a necessary starting point for the industry. In the rotoscope method, animators stood at a glass-topped desk and traced over a projected live-action film frame-by-frame, copying actors' or animals' actions directly onto a hand-drawn world. The technique produced fluid, lifelike movements that animators couldn't achieve on their own.
With 'Siren,' Unreal Engine blurs the line between CGI and reality
Epic Games has been obsessed with real-time motion capture for years, but the company is now trying to take its experiments with the technology one step further. Enter "Siren," a digital personality that it created alongside a few prominent firms in the gaming industry: Vicon, Cubic Motion, 3Lateral and Tencent (which just became a major investor in Ubisoft). The crazy thing about Siren is that she comes to life using live mocap tech, powered by software from Vicon, that can make her body and finger movements be captured and live-streamed into an Unreal Engine project.
The VR arcade of the future will look something like this
I knew I was on solid ground. I knew that no matter if I misstepped, I wouldn't fall hundreds of feet, plummeting to my death in some CG-Egyptian ruin. And yet, I was shaky, desperately reaching out for a handhold to steady myself, unable to calmly place one foot in front of the other as I attempted to cross a chasm bridged by a collection of meager wooden beams.
Two days at E3 with a Vicon Revue life-blogging camera (video)
Each year the video gaming Mecca that is the Electronics Entertainment Expo seems to get a little more... stale. I've been attending since 1997, back when PC games dominated the show floor, scantily-clad mascots were everywhere, and press releases were handed out in three-ring binders. Despite the increasing sameness of it all it's still a huge privilege to go, an invitation I receive every summer and wish I could share with all my gamer friends -- which is, at this point, just about all of them. This year, thanks to Vicon, who kindly let me borrow one of its wearable Revue cameras, I can finally take you all along for the ride. %Gallery-96315%
Microsoft's life-blogging SenseCam becomes the ViconRevue, coming to a lanyard near you in 2010
The months of 2004 were halcyon days for those hoping to capture their entire existences digitally. Nokia was talking up Lifeblog as a way to chronicle every action of every day, while Microsoft had a few SenseCams floating around, snapping random images twice a minute to create a sort of slideshow of your daily tedium. Neither went mainstream, but Microsoft's option still has some legs, getting licensed by a company called Vicon and re-dubbed the ViconRevue. It now has 1GB of internal storage backing what seems to be a VGA camera sensor that can snap a picture every 30 seconds. At £500 ($820) they're currently intended for those studying Alzheimers and dementia, but a consumer model is due next year, and hopefully it will be affordable enough for those with memories but no government grants.
