Hi foy,
I haven't tried PS3 Eye capture with my daughter but I imagine tracking the data should be not different from tracking Kinect capture data. In fact, it may be easier with PS3 because of the higher framerate (60fps vs 30fps) and better coverage of the performance.
I found that tracking a child's motions is more challenging that tracking an adult's. The tricky thing about tracking my daughter was her unpredictable, hyper-active motions. Her movements are typical of a five year old but I never paid this much attention to it until I tried tracking it in iPi Studio. The movements are surprisingly quick and snappy, almost cartoon-like, which I'm sure occasionally surprises the tracker too. :)
One issue I found was that Studio tends to 'clip' part of the volume at ground level, which unfortunately can include tiny feet in their entirety. It may be a good idea to have the performer wear sneakers or boots to help maintain the volume. This works for adults too--I've started wearing boots when I capture myself. Note that this may be a problem unique to Kinect capture so you might not run into it with PS3 Eye.
When I originally tracked the footage in iPi Studio 1.0 a while back, the Actor would not size down to my daughter's height (about 1m at the time.) When I mentioned this to the developers, they responded immediately and made it so that I could scale the Actor to fit. The next issue ran into was that the proportion of the limbs did not exactly fit my daughter's but somehow iPi Studio managed to get through the data without too much trouble.
In iPi Studio 2.0, the developers added limited support for customizing the Actor's limbs. This seems to help but I did run into a new problems with 2.0 which made the spine and shoulders deform poorly. Fortunately, I was able to figure out the workarounds for these problems which was
thoroughly explored in another thread.
The main issues you need to be aware of involve shoulder tracking and limb-length.
First: Shoulder Tracking, leave it disabled, at least when using the current release (2.2.1.145). There exists a bug in this version that makes shoulder tracking work correctly only when it is 'disabled'. Naturally, this affects children and adult performances.
Second: Because you cannot adjust limb length, there's not much you can do about this in the current release but with a little skill you may be able to work around certain problems. What I've found is that if the limbs are set too long, they can result in poor tracking when the Actor is crouched down low (as in my daughter's mocap) and if the limbs are too short they can affect quality when the character is fully standing and walking (also in the same mocap). I'm finding that I need to vary the scale of the Actor during tracking to optimize the quality. It takes some practice to make this work smoothly but it can be done. Hopefully, iPi will provide a better solution to this problem in the future.
One final issue I ran into with that particular mocap sessoin involved the environment we shot in. When my daughter gets too close to the sofa behind her, her volume tends to merge with the sofa's space, which confused the Tracker in two brief moments. When this happens, I had to track the frames manually. If you're using version 2.0, this is actually easier to do now using the variety of copy/paste options. However, it's best to avoid coming in contact with large solid objects in the room altogether.
Hope this helps.
G.
