An interesting piece from Engadget looking at the history of motion capture. From the early days of rotoscoping, the present with goofy apps and the future with issues mo-cap fraud, Motion capture is ingrained in our society.
Rotoscoping was a primitive and time-consuming process, but it was a necessary starting point for the industry. In the rotoscope method, animators stood at a glass-topped desk and traced over a projected live-action film frame-by-frame, copying actors’ or animals’ actions directly onto a hand-drawn world. The technique produced fluid, lifelike movements that animators couldn’t achieve on their own.
By the 1980s, animators were using bodysuits lined with active markers and a handful of large cameras to track actors’ movements, resulting in digital images with much more detail and precision than Harrison’s radioactive line drawings. But even in the 1990s, each mocap-ready camera was roughly the size of a small refrigerator, and animators had to manually assign each marker, in each frame, for every scene. It was nearly as painstaking as rotoscoping.
“If there are people that want to use this advancing technology for ill intent, then we will in every possible way disassociate ourselves from them,” Ovadya says. “But I think that’s just kind of the nature of all technology right now. It’s not just motion capture — any technology is advancing so fast that it can be used to confuse people and to take them in a different direction. Hopefully, people recognize that that’s not what this should be used for.”
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
