The system is doing skeleton tracking on the arm and determining where the shoulder, elbow, and wrist is, using it to control the movement and posture of the giant funky bird! 

External link

Design IO

The QUMA (pronounced Cooma), from Japanese company SoftEther, works kind of like those 3D wooden mannequins that artists often pose when sketching the human body. Except that the QUMA connects to your PC over USB, and the majority of the puppets’ joints feature sensors that not only detect when they’ve been moved and adjusted, but also translate those movements to the character in your 3D software.

Japan-based SoftEther has developed a 3D motion-capture figure to create computer graphics and animations in 3D. Known as the QUMA, this human-like doll has a set of joints throughout its body, all of which are equipped with sensors and can be moved freely by the user. The QUMA motion capture puppet is ideal for designers and engineers to create 3D CG animation. Watch the video after the jump.

This is a quick video illustrating how Measurand’s ShapeHand glove device can be used in the Quest3D software.

FiberMotion software (ShapeRecorder) 支援輸出以下格式:

BVH – skeletal data
3D – marker data
Cartesian

FiberMotion相容於以下軟體:

By Daniel Vlasic, Rolf Adelsberger, Giovanni Vannucci, John Barnwell, Markus Gross, Wojciech Matusik, Jovan Popovi´c

Commercial motion-capture systems produce excellent in-studio reconstructions, but offer no comparable solution for acquisition in everyday environments. We present a system for acquiring motions almost anywhere. This wearable system gathers ultrasonic time-of-flight and inertial measurements with a set of inexpensive miniature sensors worn on the garment. After recording, the information is combined using an Extended Kalman Filter to reconstruct joint configurations of a body. Experimental results show that even motions that are traditionally difficult to acquire are recorded with ease within their natural settings. Although our prototype does not reliably recover the global transformation, we show that the resulting motions are visually similar to the original ones, and that the combined acoustic and inertial system reduces the drift commonly observed in purely inertial systems. Our final results suggest that this system could become a versatile input device for a variety of augmented-reality applications.

商業化的動作擷取系統多數可在工作室內重建出來，但提供無法提供解決方法於每日週遭環境中。因次我們提供一套可以在任何地方使用的動作擷取系統。這個 穿戴式系統利用低廉的微型傳感器miniature sensors，收集超音波time-of-flight與慣性量測資料。經過紀錄後，將資訊結合外部Kalman Filter建置身體關節點結構。實驗結果顯示，即使動作一般屬於難以透過自然設定被擷取與紀錄。隨然我們的Prototype並不是很穩定的去完成全部3D人體的變形，但我們顯示的結果是Motion與視覺化的人物非常相近，並結合音響和慣性的系統，降低drift，研究的最終結果是建議這套系統可以成為多功能輸入裝置給予擴增實境方面的應用。

相關連結 Extenal Link

Practical Motion Capture in Everyday Surroundings

Jovan Popović

PuppetShow is a system that allows people use there bodies to control virtual characters. Puppet show uses a webcam to track the movements of a puppet and translates the gestures into bone movements in a game engine. Puppet Show’s goal is remove confusing middleware (keyboards and mice) from the player interface and allow the users to use their body’s natural expressiveness to convey themselves in virtual environments.

PuppetShow was built with Processing and runs within the Unreal Runtime using custom characters. Currently PuppetShow is in the late alpha phases and can track any flat color puppet and relay the actions two different specialized characters: a duck and a panda. Currently the PuppetShow team is integrating the complete PuppetShow animation system into the standard Unreal skeletal system. In the near future PuppetShow will be able to control any Unreal character through the PuppetShow interface.

How it Works

PuppetShow in truth is actually two separate systems that communicate over a TCP link: the puppet tracker and the Unreal puppet animation system. Below is the overall flow diagram of how PuppetShow works.

Puppet tracking is accomplished by using a puppet, a webcam, and the PuppetShow color tracking software. The color tracking software uses a refined blob tracking algorithm to track solid colors on a puppet. Since the tracking is based solely on color almost anything can act as a puppet: origami, gloves, socks, shirts and so forth! The tracking color can be set easily with the dynamic color calibration system. Based on a predetermined scheme, the tracking software then takes the blobs and translates them into usable information which is subsequently sent to the Unreal Runtime running the PuppetShow animation system.

The PuppetShow Mutator takes in values from the color tracker and translates them into bone translations and rotations. These are then applied to the character controlled 3D mesh (in the above diagram: a ducky!) which is subsequently displayed on the screen. An important note: PuppetShow does not interfere with the standard input devices of Unreal. This allows players to move and manipulate their characters as they would usually be able to.

http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~dhunt/puppetshow/index.htm

by devin grey hunt.