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Old 06-02-2005, 12:34 PM   #1
justinc
Dojo: Enso Center, Redmond
Location: Seattle, WA, USA
Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 55
Australia
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Motion capture systems and martial arts

A client I work with will be shortly installing a motion capture system for their own use. I have free access to this facility whenever I need it (typical commerical joints charge US$1000 per hour or more).

Since I am a realtime 3D graphics geek by day and already spend a lot of time working within this realm, the idea of combining the job with my hobby is naturally quite an appealing thing. Specifically, one of my post-blackbelt activity interests is in the area of making some interactive 3D trainers/demo/something applications involving martial arts. Along with my teacher and whoever else I can con^H^H^H talk into helping out, I'll be doing a lot of recording of real techniques. Ideally, as part of this, I'd like to be able to illustrate the circular motion - it will be really easy to highlight given such data - just join the dots of each sample point with lines.

Apart from a few games, I've never seen this done before in the large scale. I'd thought I'd ask here to see if anyone has done motion capture work of martial arts techniques. Any information you can share would be greatly appreciated. As they haven't yet purchased the system, if you have specific recommendations for good systems that could handle the fast paced motions of martial arts (not necessarily just Aikido, but I would also like to do maybe Tai Chi and Hapkido too) at full speed, that I could feed to them ahead of time to influence their purchasing system, that would greatly appreciated.

Finally, if you have no idea what I was just talking about, but would be interested in some sort of interactive 3D "thing" that showed off Aikido or one of the other martial arts, please let me know what you'd be interested in seeing. This will be a long term project - I'm expecting 12+ months, but something that could benefit us all in the long run.

Justin Couch
Student of life.
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