Introducing a new real-time articulated hand tracker which can enable new possibilities for human-computer interaction (HCI). Our system accurately reconstructs complex hand poses across a variety of subjects using only a single depth camera. It also allows for a high-degree of robustness, continually recovering from tracking failures. However, the most unique aspect of our tracker is its flexibility in terms of camera placement and operating range.

Please note, we are using a standard Xbox One Kinect without any hardware modifications. The sunglasses are optional and were originally used for anonymity, and partly tongue-in-cheek.


here is a video link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-xXrMpOHyc

Hi There,
I am currently using iPiSoft with a dual Kinect setup and it is working very well for gross body movements.
Thank you.

However, I want to incorporate in better hand and head tracking.
The head tracking I can solve with this: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=7134
looks great.

However, using the PS moves for hand tracking seems limited. I'd much rather use a cyberglove
or build something like this: http://www.instructables.com/id/Build-a ... ed-by-Bay/

or even hack an old PowerGlove (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Glove) (it has 2bits of rotation data for the fingers not including the pinky!)

However, none of this will happen without a way to get the tracking data into iPiSoft. (I suppose I could record the hand movements separately but that's a pain to synchronize properly)

So, I'd like to request an open API for a hand tracker system in iPiSoft's recorder.

Thank you for your time,
Ben Schleimer

The Microsoft demo above looks very interesting. Is this something iPi Soft can incorporate into Mocap Studio? Naturally, I mean as a capture process recorded independently of the body capture system. Since Mocap Studio now supports Kinect 2, it would a logical expansion for the current system.

Perhaps ironically, I'm requesting this as an animator who actually likes to animate hands and fingers manually. :)

BTW, it's not unusual to record body, hands and especially faces in separate sessions, even in big budget studio productions. Way back when I was working on the Fable 2 E3 announcement trailer at Rhythm & Hues, the mocap company we contracted had recorded the body and hands separately and they merged the data together during the editing process. (We keyframed the face animations ourselves manually--this was quite a long time ago and face capture technology just wasn't quite there yet.)

For my own personal projects, when I need to merge and sync/re-time separate motion data, I use a third party animation program, but it would be great to see more editing capabilities within Mocap Studio so users can 'do it all' before exporting the data to the final rendering program.

I realize that's a tall order but, as indie artists who would like to eventually move away from Motion Builder as an intermediary program, having it all in Mocap Studio would be very cool and useful. At present, Alisa and I have way too many programs in our pipeline and we would love to streamline and simplify it.

Thanks for listening guys. :)

G.

_________________
Greenlaw
Artist/Partner - Little Green Dog | My Demo Reels (2013,) (2015,) (2017,) and (2019)

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

...

Animated characters rarely need to move their fingers that much anyway, a bit jittery to me, clean up would be a nightmare, I could manual hand pose faster than I could clean that mess up, lol... I will stick to a Move controller and hand pose library, until iPi can implement something better.

That might be good for Kinect based hand gesture games, I don't see it being optimal for character hand animations.

...

As a quick followup, I am still very interested in getting iPiSoft integration with one of the many VR gloves coming onto the market.

I feel like getting easy hand mocap would be an easy addition to the iPiSoft system.
There is the vmglite which is a little expensive but is available now.
Then there is the controlvr system which is still in development but much cheaper.
Finally the manumachina glove is very interesting. It's close to available and the price point is low.
There are other VR glove systems out there...

Adding the hand mocap to the animation after exporting from iPiSoft is possible but would be difficult to get the animation synchronized properly both temporally and spatially.

Anyone know how this can be made into a formal feature request?

Cheers
Ben

I beg to differ. Typical hand capture data is just keyframes and you can merge the hand data to the finger bones after exporting from iPi Mocap Studio and change the timing of the hand performance like you would any keyframed motion data. Motion Builder, for example, makes this process almost trivial by using motion 'clips' you can slide, squash and stretch on a non-linear timeline, but this can also be done in pretty much be done in any 3D program without a lot of difficulty.

Where things might get tricky is when two hands have to touch and interact with each other. Then, you'll probably be doing quite a bit of tweaking in your 3D app...but it's highly likely you would be doing that anyway even if you managed to capture the hand data during the body capture performance. That's where being able temporarily pin the wrist joints in place and use i/k to override the capture data comes into play. (Still hoping iPi Mocap Studio will support this feature...especially for feet.) :)

G.

_________________
Greenlaw
Artist/Partner - Little Green Dog | My Demo Reels (2013,) (2015,) (2017,) and (2019)

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!