Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Scientists Develop Way of Capturing Movement of a Body in 3D

3Dwalkthroughs.com came across an article in Science Daily about a new technique that allows for the capture of a human body in 3D. The technique was developed by researchers from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) and the University of Lovaina (UCL), in Belgium.

The process uses 2 video cameras to capture human movement, and makes it possible to recognize body movements and display them in three dimensions on a computer, according to the journal Multimedia Tools & Applications.

The technology is interesting as it does not require any special suits or receivers, using a simple video camera to film the body's movement. One of the obvious markets for this is the interactive gaming market. If exergamers can lose the Wii controllers and other devices that might restrict their movement, the level of interaction within these games will be much greater than they are today.

The low level of complexity in this system allows it to be applied in real time on any personal computer, with a margin of error of between 4% and 9% in real situations, depending on the context and the quality of the segmentation carried out.

Source Science Times

The more sensitive the camera with regards to translating to the movement of a human body to a 3D computer object, the more immersive will be the experience for the end user.

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