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Autodesk® HumanIK® animation middleware is a runtime solution for creating believable, interactive character animation for games.
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Motion Control devices and game animation?

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Message 1 of 3
Anonymous
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Motion Control devices and game animation?

Here's one hot topic to get this forum started: what do you think of the motion controllers announced by Sony and Microsoft? Do you think they will have a big impact on the animation work that's needed for games, manipulating directly how your character is moving, or will they be used primarily as input devices to an otherwise conventional game? Or something in between?
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AndrewClausen
in reply to: Anonymous

While I have not done much research into Microsoft's Kinect, I have done some looking into Sony's PS3 Eye.

From just skimming some of my favorite news pages I have come across some homebrew applications for the Kinect. One of the most interesting was a system that uses the Kinects camera and infrared depth camera to create a motion capture system that uses only one viewer. As I do not own a Kinect I have not looked very deeply into applications like this.

I have been interested in more traditional methods however. Sony's PS3 Eye achieves 60fps with almost no load to a computer system. I bought one used for $25 and connected it to my computer after I had installed a homebrew driver. At 640x480 resolution it did indeed capture a very smooth 60fps with no loss in video quality from compression. Depending on what software I use, I plan on acquiring a second camera and recording two video samples simultaneously and afterwards converting them properly and using them in MatchMover 2012 to experiment with motion capture footage that I capture myself. Currently I have been using some free software developed by a group called Code Laboratories.

I am very excited and future prospects are good for low cost DIY motion capture systems as both the Kinect and PS3 Eye are very hackable. I am president of a video game research and development club at my university and we are all very excited for the prospect of using these inexpensive devices in motion capture and implementing them in video game control schemes.
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Anonymous
in reply to: Anonymous

Cool - do check out Kinect though. There was a rumor at one point that MS would raise the resolution of the captured video through a firmware update, which would be nice, but otherwise it's still a gigantic improvement over a video frame as you get depth. There's a video out there of someone who used two Kinect cameras to do full scene reconstruction in real-time; they were just using it to allow you to see an object from more than one point of view, but imagine having one Kinect fixed in space, and it being able to track the location of a second Kinect camera; instant room reconstruction as you move the second Kinect around (without needing to extract motion)!

That's all nice for authoring, but I still haven't seen nice gameplay tied to Kinect (or Move) that isn't just some form of puppeteering. It will come.

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