Body Motion Capture and Animation Technology

For full-body motion capture we used three different setups. One setup consisted of a leightweight lycra suit with attached reflective markers which were captured and processed with Vicon Blade software. For post-processing and animation of body parts or the full body we used Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya and Autodesk Motion Builder.
 
 

The second and third setups were used for real-time motion capture and animation. The second setup used up to two Xsens MVN Suits, consisting of 17 MTx inertial measurement units each. The MVN Biomech software allowed for additional synchronized 60fps video recordings with an external camera. It offered integrated data visualization of joint angles and accelerations as well as direct export and streaming into game engines like Unity. The third setup used the HTC Vive Lighthouse tracking system to track hand controllers and additional Vive Tracker units which can be used to animate the body in real-time using inverse kinematics software.

Avatars models used for experiments are part of the Rocketbox Studios GmbH Complete Characters Library. Through the work of the independent research group, Space and Body Perception (Betty Mohler) in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (Michael Black) we were also able to create personalized self-avatars for our experiments.