At SIGGRAPH, mo-cap producer PhaseSpace will allow participants to personally try out a system in their motion capture studio. Suited-up attendees will be able to perform and see the results in real time due to PhaseSpace's unique systems, they can then take their moves home on a DVD. SIGGRAPH's main exhibition will take place from August 12-14 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Phasespace will be across from the Autodesk booth in the studio.
The 24 camera motion capture studio in PhaseSpace's booth is identical to ones in major video game design and research labs around the country. Attendees may sign up at SIGGRAPH for time slots where they can experience the latest in cutting-edge mo-cap technology. As the attendees move their bodies each nuance is sent to an ordinary PC with PhaseSpace's software on it.
On this PC, in real time, a variety of computer animated characters mirror every move. From rhinos in their underwear to characters running native in the UNREAL 3 engine, the attendees' motions will be seamlessly transferred. The raw data and the animated avatar will be then be given to the attendee on a disk for them to use later. If patrons went to a Hollywood studio to get this same disk it would cost upwards of $1,000 per minute per character.
"We like to show that we are the fastest, most robust and most affordable motion capture equipment anywhere," said Tracy McSheery, Vice President and Chief Engineer at PhaseSpace. "It can be used outdoors, or indoors, takes up less space and is easier to use than older systems allowing companies like Epic, Zombie, and Brainzoo to do more motion capture in a few days than they used to do in entire projects."
The PhaseSpace system uses active LED markers which blink a unique ID for each marker. This allows the computer to do cleanup that older systems required doing with sophisticated software or by painstaking hand labor. At three times the speed and three times the resolution of other systems, the Impulse system is real time, and doesn't require the smoothing and filtering that older technologies need. At one third the price of older technologies, PhaseSpace allows individual teams and projects to afford their own systems, eliminating the scheduling and budgeting bottlenecks previously suffered.
To find out more about PhaseSpace, go to www.phasepace.com.
