Ever wonder what it would be like to play with virtual reality? Well three people from the simulation, animation and gaming department, (also known as SAG) James Pink, Angel Balsdon and the leader of the project, senior Mark Steeby delve deeper into 3D motion tracking and turn virtual into reality.
I sat down with Steeby and asked him to tell me about the project they are working on. He responded with, “The project we were working on was for TEDxEMU. We decided to go with how gaming is life and how entertainment is moving more and more toward realism.”
He continued with explaining how they were able to accomplish this.
“We brought in a portable motion capture studio to show the people in TEDx just how simple it can be to make 3D models more realistic just using an Xbox 360, a Kinect and two pieces of software.”
The two pieces of software they experimented with were called Brekel Kinect and Autodesk Motion Builder. Brekel Kinect software is designed to take data that is incoming from the Kinect and clean it up while applying a 3D skeleton to the person standing in the view, while Autodesk Motion Builder software takes the information it gains from Brekel, refines it a little bit more and puts that skeleton into a live time motion capture; so as an actor moves his arm up, the skeleton on the screen moves his arm up at the same time.
Brekel Kinect is a free download at brekel.com, and Autodesk is available for free for students in the College of Technology. “Eastern has a contract with Autodesk for the College of Technology students.
If you go to autodeskstudent.com and register with your emich email, they will allow you to download any of their educational software packages with a three year license attached to it,” Steeby explained.
“What Brekel does is, you go into something we call the Psi pose, where you stand still and have your arms up,” Steeby said as he put his arms in the air to make a ‘U’ shape with his biceps horizontal, and his arms and hands vertical.
“From there it recognizes this as the human elbow,” as he points to his elbow, “and this is a human wrist,” as he points to his wrist.” The Brekel software has an algorithm built into the program that recognizes all the joints throughout the body and calculates them as x or y points, therefore creating the lines for the skeletal diagram.
A demonstration of their project took place in Quirk Sponberg alongside several other TEDx labs, after about a year’s worth of research. I asked Steeby why they decided to do this project and he replied with, “It all started last year. A senior friend of mine pulled up a video of what this guy did with the Kinect and we were like, ‘We must go get a Kinect.’
So our department bought a Kinect last year and we didn’t really get a chance to mess around with it because it was the end of the semester. So this fall semester they said basically they wanted us to grow and develop a bit more so we just started researching into it on our own and I came into class one day and was like, ‘Look what I can do with the Kinect.’ ”
He continued saying, “It’s an unknown technology and it’s something that could really be beneficial to everyone. Over in the Kinesiology Department we got talking to a few people. They have a motion capture studio there, and they do is scientific research.
When I was at TEDx I was talking to them and they had one of the track runners running on a treadmill and were measuring his running style. So they were measuring angles from that and with that information they can go on and create new prosthetics
from that.”
Using Google, Brekel’s website and fooling around with Autodesk, Steeby and his team were able to research 3D motion tracking. He said the research is ongoing and that he is learning more and more every day.
“I’m still learning the software, there’s a few more who are still learning the software. We’re still trying to argue to get a motion capture class for Eastern.” If that’s something you’re interested in, join Steeby, Pink and Balsdon in their efforts to create a motion capture class.
