Last week's Mocap training

Carla in Gypsy IV with Ali
Originally uploaded by XaOS.

With everything else happening I only got to sit in on some of the training for the Gypsy system, but what I saw was excellent. Ali Kourd was his usual sharp, witty and patient, and as intimately familiar with the system as only the inventor could be. The more we find out about the system and its inherent strengths (wireless, joint-located, real-time) and failings (bulky, requiring expert operation, breakable in the hands of us novices) the more we're in awe of what Ali's achieved. We're also pretty excited about the development potential of the system, and we'll be developing a paper on this in the new year. I'll link to the abstract when we've finished it.

RoboLecturer

Robert lecturing in a Gypsy Mo-Cap suit
Originally uploaded by XaOS.

This was fun! We had a SIG-VR meeting for the Virtual Worlds project group, and wanted to demo how the Gypsy turns raw data from the joint-located potentiometers into positional data, finally producing a live stream that we can pull into Kaydara Filmbox. So I arrived early, got trussed up in a suit for the first time since delivery, and talked students through the process. Consequently I spent most of the rest of the morning in the suit talking through video chat with iChat AV. While the Gypsy is not bad to wear, this morning's comfort break couldn't couldn't come soon enough. There are some things you just don't want to see motion captured.

First Gypsy Demo

The Lord Mayor of Birmingham with Dr Gregory Sporton
Originally uploaded by XaOS.

Talk about a baptism by fire! We had about 6 hours to prepare a demo (for the Lord Mayor) of the motion capture suits that we've only just taken delivery of. Fortunately we had the inventor on hand when we were asked, and he was very keen to see the system shown off. In the event it all worked better than we could have hoped; we had the suit on Greg in under 10 minutes and a 5 minute phone call to Ali guided us through the process of using the live wireless data feed to control a character in Filmbox. The Lord Mayor was duly impressed. How long would this have taken us with an optical system?