Natural Point

Skulpture

Wondering if anyone has one of these?

http://www.naturalpoint.com/

Look interesting. I've (somehow) never come across these before until a few weeks ago.

The optical tracking or 'OptiTrack' (http://www.naturalpoint.com/optitrack/) is particularly intriguing! A theatre/dance alternative to the kinect?

Thoughts, comments?

eight

$35 000 for a minimial body tracker?

Fred

I use an optitrack system with 8 s250e cameras. Yes it is expensive but it is very cheap compared to the competition (other full mocap systems). It is way more than a minimal body tracker and can track a lot of objects with extreme precision in large areas. (I use 8x8 m truss grid hanging about 4 m high). These systems are amazing, complicated to use especially to tour but I used it for 3 years and know it intimately. They are expensive but there is nothing else that can give you this kind of tracking. We get position and rotation updates over a proprietary network protocol into our system at over 250fps and with less than a fame delay, our video processing is always slower than the tracking.

If you compare the body tracking to that of kinect the kinect is a joke, we can use any light source and have multiple people in the room and get perfect skeleton tracking from anywhere on stage and there is no cable problems and the whole thing is super super fast and stable.

This is a high end solution, not a toy but the things you can do with it are amazing, it is not an alternative to the kinect but a full tracking system. It can track makers, and unique rigid bodies in space as well as doing skeleton decoding all at the same time.

If you have ideas that need this kind of flexibility reliability and precision these are incredible, seriously, when you start to play with them your brain explodes with the possibilities.

Unfortunately Isadora has pretty limited 3d capabilities and dealing with the maths to play with this system inside izzy is also too much of a pain, having said that the 3d inside Openframeworks (or just using pure opengl) is straightforward to learn and super flexible, great to work with this kind of data.

These are the same systems they use for capturing motion data for hollywood animations but they stream the data live as well.

If you get a chance to play with one of these systems jump on it, you will want one straight away.

Fred

eight

@Fred I am looking for a chance to use this system in a future project. Can you suggest a cheap way to get a temporary access to one of those systems?

Thanks.

--8

Fred

Not really, there are a lot of motion capture studios around, you can rent one for a day I guess. Where are you based?

eight

New York and Moscow.

--8

Armando

check the future of mobcap!! Full body for 380 us dollars!!!

[http://www.priovr.com](http://www.priovr.com)