Capturing motion as a 'personal project' was a crazy and prohibitive dream a few years ago. In fact, its availability was restricted to laboratories and multimillion-dollar film productions, but with the help of relatively inexpensive sensors and platforms like Arduino, it is now possible to capture high-precision movements with an investment of just a few hundred dollars. The KeeCap suit is an excellent example.
Video games have experienced many 'leaps of realism' in recent decades, but one of the most important is associated with motion capture. We still remember well Jordan Mechner's struggle to animate the characters of Prince of Persia, and it would be disrespectful not to mention Éric Chahi with his Another World. At that time, both followed the path of rotoscoping backed by arduous and slow work, processing individual frames. However, the world of technology was ready for something more advanced and complex.
Thirty years later, motion capture is something that even a school can use in its computer labs. Modifying Wii controllers or writing code to hack a Microsoft Kinect are a good starting point, but the person behind the small channel Checkered Bug took a slightly different path:
KeeCap: Open Source Motion Capture
A non-profit organization called Spark Studio got in touch with him. That organization is dedicated to teaching animation and film to disabled students and/or those in adverse socioeconomic situations. All the work is done by volunteers, and that means a very limited budget, but when they presented the idea of capturing the movements of some children and putting them into 3D characters, Checkered Bug didn't think twice.
His suit, named KeeCap, is based on nine-axis inertial measurement units Bosch BNO055, whose price floats around seven dollars on Aliexpress, with extremes of 25 dollars depending on the supplier. Each of these sensors is installed in its own housing with an elastic band, and connected to each other via Ethernet cable, up to an Arduino Mega 2560 that takes care of all the heavy work. Its bill of materials for a thirteen-sensor configuration averages $450, but something tells me it wouldn't be difficult to reduce that cost.
https://old.neoteo.com/prince-persia-videos-originales-usados-para-crear-las-animaciones/The video we have shared here and the files available on GitHub basically serve as a step-by-step tutorial for building and programming the KeeCap suit. All movements can be recorded in real time with Blender, or stored on an SD card for later processing. Motion capture for less than 500 dollars. We have come a long way.
Official site: Click here
