Project Description

wireless motion capture gearVicon Motion Systems is one of the leading manufacturers of optical motion capture hardware used for animation of CG characters in movies and video games. In 2001, Carnegie Mellon's Computer Graphics lab installed an motion capture lab using 12 Vicon cameras and processing equipment. Typically these systems are used for research or animation by a process of recording and offline analysis. The goal of the project I worked on was to see if the system could also be used in realtime to perform tracking for virtual reality without needed to tether the guest with any wires. Since my development of the realtime, wireless virtual reality system using the motion capture lab, the Entertainment Technology Center has used this system for several virtual reality based projects.

My Role

tracking head and handsMy first goal was to figure out how to get the Vicon system to perform marker tracking in realtime and relay that data to a virtual reality world. This involved experimenting with different optical marker placements, marker set configuration files, calibration routines, and camera setups. Once I had a marker set I could reliably track in realtime over a reasonable sized
tracking additional objectsarea without any objects flipping or disappearing, I wrote plugins to be able to use this data in either the Alice or Panda3D game engines. The second part of the project required me to put together a hardware configuration that a person could wear to receive video for and power a head-mounted display. This was an iterative process starting out with a heavy backpack and ending up with a light pair of video glasses and a vest. I also built several demos to experiment with various aspects of what you could do with this virtual reality system that wasn't possible with more traditional setups.
mixing real and virtual objects

In addition to my work with the realtime aspect of the system, I was also trained to perform traditional full-body motion capture and offline analysis. I wrote the motion capture animation importer for the Alice engine used in the Building Virtual Worlds class. As a TA for that class, I was responsible for teaching all the students about how motion capture worked. Each student was given at least one opportunity to use motion capture animation in one of their group projects which I had to capture, clean, and export for them to add to their world.

Videos

Motion capture animation from Building Virtual Worlds