Low Cost Motion Capture

January 9, 2007 | General | By: Mark VandeWettering

Just thought I’d stash a reference to this paper on low cost motion capture. It uses two webcams to track the lower half of someone’s body. Just keeping this for inspiration in a related project.

Comments

Comment from Jen Rozler
Time 1/12/2007 at 11:58 am

Hi,
I enjoyed reading the paper…you might want to check out phasespace.com if you are interested in low cost motion capture. Our Impulse system has the highest resolution and lowest cost of any mocap system on the market today. We can arrange a remote demonstration if you have a high speed Internet connection.
This is definitely a growing technology!

Comment from Ed Rentz
Time 1/15/2008 at 10:59 pm

Hi,

I really wish the price on motion capture units will come down. I can’t say how cheap PhaseSpace is (since they don’t put prices on their website, or at lease anywhere under a link that breaks down the cost) but so far the cheapest system I found is Optitrack for $5K
http://www.naturalpoint.com/optitrack/

Not cheap when you are a student, but cheaper than the 30K-100K units out there. Thanks for the paper link. It was an interesting read.

Comment from Jeff H.
Time 3/21/2008 at 7:02 am

I checked out phasespace, and the guy quoted me something close to 50k. Kind of rediculous when Optitrack sells a system for $5K.

Comment from exDreem
Time 5/11/2008 at 9:03 pm

I think for your budget
best option is movimento or syntheye
video based mocap system.

Comment from exDreem
Time 5/11/2008 at 9:05 pm

I think for your budget
best option is movimento or syntheye
both softwares work best on dv footages.

Comment from Paul M.
Time 6/3/2008 at 9:12 am

Yea, optitrack is cheap and looks good. But it doesn’t connect with other programs… Say you want to use Autodesk Maya with it, you’ll have to write software for it. Lame.

Comment from Vox Raisin
Time 9/9/2008 at 2:46 pm

The Natural Point Optitrak system is ridiculously good for the price. No offense, Paul M., but what’s LAME is you bashing this excellent system (which I’m guessing you’ve never even used) because it doesn’t do everything that systems costing 10x as much can do. I’ve used most of the mocap systems currently available, and NP’s $5k Optitrak blows them all away in terms of performance-per-unit-price. Seriously, what system comes even close?! BTW, If you want to interface with other programs, Optitrak can stream real-time data (marker positions and/or joint angles) via TCP/IP.

Comment from Sheikh
Time 1/11/2010 at 8:55 pm

Do you guys know how much Qualisys Track Manager will cost? any idea??