Siggraph

Having covered the motion capture beat for years, I have found in recent years the most interesting stories for our magazine(s) have always been application-specific stories–how it was used on a particular project like Beowulf , Polar Express , etc. In terms of the technology specific stories, I’ve felt we havent’ received earth-shattering news from the industry in a long while–either the technology was optical or it was tethered or it was some kind of wireless gyroscopic transmission system. Either it was high end or it was low end, and either it was put to good use or it wasn’t.

While it’s still not earth-shattering given the rapid pace of today’s IP-based developments, I did see today something on the technology side I had not seen before, and something that I think has some interesting applications. That something was Animazoo’s IGS-190 system, which the company dubbs “live Internet animation.” By that, they mean that they have come up with a pretty seamless approach for live streaming of motion-capture data in real time, creating all sorts of interesting possibilities on the remote collaboration front.

The Animazoo demo at the company’s Siggraph booth (#907) is, according Ali Kord, the company’s director of technology, “brand new,” and the demo, at least, worked pretty seamlessly. Basically, the company set up a Skype video/audio connection with its motion capture laboratory in the U.K. so that booth visitors could instruct a motion capture actor on that stage across the ocean to go through various movements. Those movements were captured by the IGS-190 system, and the data processed via brand new proprietary software, analyzed, and streamed across a broadband connection in what seemed like, to me, to be real time. An animated stick figure was mimicking the actor’s movement on a large monitor instantly.

Obviously, as Kord suggests, this has lots of potential for those needing or wanting to collaborate remotely on major animated projects incorporating motion capture. But he also suggests that there are lots of other multimedia places to go with it. For one thing, the company is currently working on a two-year research project with the University of Sussex in the U.K. to build an online gaming world and incorporate remote, real-time animation for characters that would populate that world. In other words, it has, potentially, consumer applications. People could use consumer versions of the system to animate and move characters in real time through that virtual world, interacting with other real-time avatars, so to speak.

Animazoo also is reportedly in talks with a U.K. theme park company (Kord can’t say which one just yet) to create a theme park attraction that incorporates the technology so that visitors could animate instantly their own cartoon characters.

–MG