Hi,

I *think* from what I've been able to find on the wiki, that the PS Move can be used *only* for orientation tracking, and not for position? Hopefully I'm wrong, because all I really need at this point for my project is position tracking of a user's hands. Using only the PS Move would be a lot faster than what I'm doing now, namely using a kinect and then doing fully skeletal tracking (slow on my laptop with lame GPU chip!).

If I *can* use it for position tracking, can I use my kinect, or do I get a PS eye?

Thanks

-M

Hi
Yes, you've got the right understanding from our docs. Our product does not allow to track PS Move's position separately. This would require using other kinds of algorithms than those which are empoyed by our software.
I think for your purpose you need a tool that focuses on object tracking rather than motion capture.
If you do not need high accuracy, you can simply rely on realtime tracking provided by Kinect SDK. Either do some programming yourself or find one of the products based on Kinect SDK's tracking that suits your needs.

Alright, good to know. Thanks!

I don't know if this helps but after you export your tracked body motion and bring it into an animation program, you could parent a null/locater to the wrist bone and then bake the motion of the parented item. That will give you a positional motion path of the 'hand' in world space. You don't need the Move controller for that.

Just a thought.

G.

_________________
Greenlaw
Artist/Partner - Little Green Dog | Demo Reel (2017) | Demo Reel (2015) | Demo Reel (2013)


Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

Thanks for the suggestion. This is basically what I've been doing. I can parent (in Maya) any object I like to the wrist joint. But processing the whole body motion capture into the skeleton is very slow on my gear (3.5 hours for a 60 second capture) so I'm looking for something faster to just track hand position.

-M

...

Have you tried a real-time solution like Brekel Pro Body v1 or v2? At this point his only works with one Kinect, so you would have limitations on motions anyway to work through.

I have not used the Kinect Studio in Windows, but it uses XEF format and seems no way to convert it yet for external use in 3D editors.

Neither of these will give accurate hand tracking that was occluded from the camera, even iPi won't that well with one Kinect, but it is better up to about an 80 degree rotation from camera, as long as you keep a good piece of the hand visible to camera, but you may still loose accuracy in the arm positioning.

...

No I haven't tried Brekel, I didn't realize it was real-time. I'll try it out, thanks. For now one kinect will be fine. I imagine there are some apps out there that can do realtime position and orientation from just the PS Move, I'll look for one of those too.

-M

For positional tracking, I believe PS Move also requires multiple PS4 Cameras. It does this by vsiually tracking the lighted ball. I don't think the Move controller by itself has any way to report positional data.

Years ago, you also needed a PS3 game console (that's how it worked for the virtual camera in LightWave anyway,) but that may have changed by now.

G.

_________________
Greenlaw
Artist/Partner - Little Green Dog | Demo Reel (2017) | Demo Reel (2015) | Demo Reel (2013)


Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

Yes, the PS Eye cameras track the glowing orb on the PS Move to calc position (including depth too from size of the ball). Too bad (for me at least) that iPi can't use that info for tracking position.

-M

How are you using this data? If you just need to track a moving object (like a point light source or a 'dot',) would a traditional 3D tracking program be more suitable? (I like to use SynthEyes myself--it's reasonably priced and packs a ton of features.)

Just a thought.

_________________
Greenlaw
Artist/Partner - Little Green Dog | Demo Reel (2017) | Demo Reel (2015) | Demo Reel (2013)


Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!