You are browsing the archive for motion capture.

by J Milo Taylor

WFAE Conference: Abstract Submission

June 14, 2011 in audio, conference, relationscape by J Milo Taylor

WFAE 2011: Crossing Listening Paths

Keynote Speakers:
R. Murray Schafer, Hildegard Westerkamp, Katharine Norman, Christopher W. Clark, Allen S. Weiss

CALL FOR SCIENTIFIC AND ARTISTIC CONTRIBUTIONS

Soundscapes are seldom simple; on the contrary, they tend to be complex sounding systems continuously changing in time, which no art or science can approach in depth on its own.

Listening is the ‘corner stone’ for the appreciation, participation and study of the sonic environment that surrounds and includes us. As Westerkamp (2002) remarks, it is the ecological balance of our planet that becomes audible “to those who care to listen.”

We might consider listening in two ways: as the actual activity of focusing (in innumerable ways) our attention to the soundings, and in a metaphorical manner; listening as a metaphor. A research or a compositional approach to the sonic environment, for example, can be thought of as a listening path.

One alone cannot listen to everything that is simultaneously sounding in the soundscape; similarly the meanings transmitted through soundings cannot be fully uncovered by a single discipline. The multidisciplinary approach in the research of the sonic environment has been highlighted from the very beginnings of Acoustic Ecology.

These different aesthetic and scientific approaches to the soundscape are considered here metaphorically as crossing listening paths, which in their ‘conjunctions’ and interactions might create a better understanding of the whole.

‘Crossing listening paths’ is the main theme of the Conference of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, which will take place at the Department of Music of the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece from 3-7 of October 2011.

The conference will be endorsed by the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology and the Hellenic Society for Acoustic Ecology, will be organized and co-sponsored by the Department of Music of the Ionian University and the Electroacoustic Music Research and Applications Laboratory (EPHMEE) of the Ionian University, and will be supported by the Computer Music Laboratory of the Department of Music Technology and Acoustics of the Technological and Educational Institute of Crete.

http://www.akouse.gr/wfae2011/

Tags: , , , , , ,
No Comments »

by Kirk Woolford

Improving Motion Capture Import & Workflow

May 5, 2011 in featured, Kirk Woolford, motion capture by Kirk Woolford

ABSTRACT
Motion capture animation is both faster and at times more realistic than a human animator, but it can hard to work with, for a variety of reasons. While Blender has had BVH import (a popular format for mocap data) for a while, it lacks tools to deal with this type of data properly. My proposal is to provide tools to streamline mocap data into a project’s workflow: conversion to f-curves, cycle and stride bone conversion and most importantly, retargeting the motion to a user-created rig.

Benjamin Cook

http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/project/google/gsoc2011/benjycook/16001

Tags: , ,
No Comments »

by Kirk Woolford

MCML: Motion Capture Markup Language

April 3, 2011 in digital media, motion capture, related work by Kirk Woolford

Tags: , , ,
No Comments »

by Stuart-Dunn

Forming questions

March 2, 2011 in archaeology, digital media, interdisciplinary, motion capture by Stuart-Dunn

The question about our MiPP project which I’m most often asked is ‘why?’ In fact that this is the whole project’s fundamental research question. As motion capture technologies become cheaper, more widely available, less dependent on equipment in fixed locations such as studios, and less dependent on highly specialist technical expertise to set them up and use them, what benefits can these technologies bring outside their traditional application areas such as performance and medical practice? What new research can they support? In such a fundamentally interdisciplinary project, there are inevitably several ‘whys’, but as someone who is, or at least once was, an archaeologist, archaeology is the ‘why’ that I keep coming back to. Matters became a lot clearer, I think, in a meeting we had yesterday with some of the Silchester archaeological team.

As I noted in my TAG presentation before Christmas, archaeology is really all about the material record: tracing what has survived in the soil, and building theories top of that. Many of these theories concern what people did, and where and how they moved while they were doing them. During a capture session in Bedford last week (which alas I couldn’t attend), the team tried out various scenarios in the Animazoo mocap suits, using the 3D Silchester Round House created by Leon, Martin and others as a backdrop. They reconstructed in a practical way how certain every day tasks might have been accomplished by the Iron Age inhabitants. As Mike Fulford pointed out yesterday, such reconstructions – which are not reconstructions in the normally accepted sense in archaeology, where the focus is usually on the visual, architectural and formal remediation of buildings (as excellently done already by the Silchester project) – themselves can be powerful stimuli for archaeological research questions. He cited a scene in Kevin Macdonald’s The Eagle, where soldiers are preparing for battle. This scene prompted the reflection that a Roman soldier would have found putting on his battle dress a time consuming and laborious process, a fact which could in turn be pivotal to the interpretation of events surrounding various aspects of Roman battles.

One aim of MiPP is to conceptualize theoretical scenarios such as this as visual data comprising digital motion traces. The e-research interest in this is that those traces cannot really be called ‘data’, and cannot be useful in the particular application area of reconstructive archaeology, if their provenance is not described, or if they are not tagged systematically and stored as retrievable information objects. What we are talking about, in other words, is the mark-up of motion traces in a way that makes them reusable. Our colleagues in the digital humanities have been marking up texts for decades. The TEI has spawned several subsets for specific areas, such as EpiDoc for marking up epigraphic data, and mark-up languages for 3D modelling (e.g. VRML) are well developed. Why then should there not be a similar schema for motion traces? Especially against the background of a field such as archaeology, where there are already highly developed information recording and presentation conventions, marking up quantitative representations of immaterial events should be easy. One example might be to assign levels of certainty to various activities, in much the same way that textual mark-up allows editors to grade the scribal or editorial certainty of sections of text. We could then say, for example, that ‘we have 100% certainty that there were activities to do with fire in this room because there is a hearth and charring, but only 50% certainty that the fire was used for ritual activity’. We could also develop a system for citing archaeological contexts in support of particular types of activity; in much the same way that the LEAP project cited Silchester’s data in support of a scholarly publication. It boils down to the fundamental principle of information science, that an information object can only be useful when its provenance is known and documented. How this can be approached for motion traces of what might have happened at Silchester in the first century AD promises to be a fascinating case study.

Originally published on Stuart’s Blog: http://stuartdunn.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/mipp-forming-questions/

Tags: , ,
No Comments »

by J Milo Taylor

Present Day (dis)Embodiment in a Virtual Iron Age

February 27, 2011 in body, dance, featured, interdisciplinary, motion capture by J Milo Taylor

Cincopa WordPress plugin

In late February, the MiPP team convened at the University of Bedford, where Helen Bailey hosted two day’s of motion capture. The objectives were to test a few aspects of the technology and methodology which have arisen over the last few weeks.

Key apects of the sessions included:

- real-time emplacement of present day motion-actors (dancers) in a virtual archaeological site (Iron Age Silchester – focusing upon the roundhouse).
- an investigation into the potential meanings and choreographies generated by such a methodology.

Tags: , ,
No Comments »

by Stuart-Dunn

Theoretical Archaeology Group Conference: Presentation

January 4, 2011 in archaeology, conference, event by Stuart-Dunn

I gave a presentation on MiPP at the TAG conference in Bristol before Christmas, in the session organized by CASPAR entitled ‘Audio-visual practice-as-research in archaeology’. The crux of the presentation was the present-day MoCap data that we gathered from Sue et al at the site this summer, what we are doing with it, and what we would like to do with it. Currently, in my mind at least, this centres on the typology of movement that we’re developing – reviewing the footage and identifying entities of posture, task, instrument and target, and building links between them. In that sense, it is more of a taxonomy (i.e. hierarchical), rather than an ontology (i.e. flat; relationship-based).  This, I think, could be very illuminating in terms of understanding archaeological practice; but of course we have to avoid be overly reductionist: every archaeologists is unique of course, and we must be clear that the typology is a means of reflecting that practice and representing it in a systematic way, rather than pigeonholing what archaeologists actually do in the field. Also, while preparing the paper, it struck me that among the things we will have to address for DEDEFI purposes are practical questions such as cost (the suits are currently prohibitively expensive for any excavation project to purchase themselves); practicality in terms of staff and infrastructure needed on site (Animazoo had to have a heavy direct involvement in our work at Silchester), ethics and privacy. And, to cull from the presentation before mine, distinguishing the kind of archaeological practice we are interested in from ‘weird practices’; which may have nothing to do with the archaeological process.

As always with these presentations, it was the questions afterwards which were really interesting (although alas I had to leave before the general discussion at the end of the day, as legions of snow clouds closed in on southern England). It was clear, once again, that engagement with other archaeological practitioners is key of MiPP is to be a success; but that a project which is about process rather than material needs  to have its proper archaeological context spelled out if that engagement is to happen.  I suspect, however, that once the second stand of the project – the dynamic reconstructions – are under way and demonstrable in a more final form; this will actually be very much easier. We must also link these processes to current discussions about agency and materiality, as discussed for example by Martin Wobst. Ruth Tringham of UC Berkeley indicated that similar issues had come up in her team’s thinking about process at Catalhoyuck. I was asked what merits the various motion capture systems have over simply videoing the excavators at work in HD: this indicates to me that we need to investigate, document and demonstrate in a very robust way the functionaries that the bvh and .fbx viewers that we are using can bring for panning, zooming, viewing the data from multiple angles in 3D and – critically – linking the data with the archaeological data that is there: these critical advantages over standard video are extremely important for the question of ‘why’, as opposed to ‘how’ do we take MoCap out of the studio. A further functionality which I think we need, which struck me when was reviewing the data earlier this week, is that we need the subject’s line of site to be projected onto the floor surface. This is not obvious in the current footage, and yet it is central to documenting the subject’s relationship with his or her material. Finally, I was asked about capturing the movements of larger numbers of people at the same time. This, of course, was originally envisaged as part of MiPP, but had to be abandoned due to technological constraints. Of course this would open the process up to capturing the pathways of visitors through, and around, sites.

Overall – still much to do, but I sense that some really interesting issues are beginning to emerge.

Tags: , ,
No Comments »

by Stuart-Dunn

Mocap Testing Silchester Dig

June 28, 2010 in archaeology, digital media, featured, motion capture, site by Stuart-Dunn

And so begins our Motion in Place Platform project, an AHRC DEDEFI grant that CeRch has with colleagues in Sussex and Bedford. The idea is to assess how performance documentation technologies can be used to capture and describe the archaeological research process. The aim is to reconsider and reconceptualize how archaeology is done, and to look at different approaches to the 3D reconstruction and understanding of heritage sites. Thanks to the kind permission of Professor Michael Fulford at the University of Reading, we are able to use the marvellous Silchester Roman Town excavation in Hampshire as a test bed. Silchester is a wonderful panorama of Iron Age and Imperial Roman occupation, leading to complete abandonment and thus fantastic preservation of the stratigraphies – but a big and complicated dig, which poses some daunting challenges for our project.

Last week, Matt Earley and Alex Chasmar from Animazoo were on site testing the kit for complete unknowns, like can ultrasonic motion trackers actually work out doors, near a big and noisy generator.

MoCap tests
The answer is yes, fortunately, they can (if it didn’t we would have had a problem). The tests went extremely well, the only possible variable being if we get a strong wind (likely, in such an exposed spot).

(Originally published on Stuart’s personal blog.

Tags: , ,
No Comments »

by SallyJaneNorman

MoCap Workshop Write-Up

June 27, 2010 in body, digital media, interdisciplinary, motion capture, related work by SallyJaneNorman


(by Jenna Ng. Originally posted on http://blog.humlab.umu.se/?p=2279. Mirrored here for archival purposes)

I am spending the weekend in Brighton, UK, to attend the Motion Capture Methodologies Workshop, organised by the School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex. The event is part of a methodologies workshop series organised by AHeSSC (Arts & Humanities e-Science Support Centre) – led by Stuart Dunn (King’s College London) – and JISC, and in collaboration with the School’s AHRC-funded Motion in Place Platform (MiPP) project.

Spanning two days, the workshop’s presentations broadly fall into 3 categories. The first is a survey of motion capture projects from various research centres and laboratories. For example, Dave Green, from Culture Lab, Newcastle University, presented mocap projects at the lab ranging from artwork (Susan Morris’s orthographic drawings) to collaboration with design companies, while Donald Glowinski (University of Genoa) shared with us the scientific and artistic projects in relation to the EyesWeb project at the InfoMus Lab. Martin White (University of Sussex; photo below) and Ali Kord (Animazoo) showed mocap passages in digital heritage research involving 3D reconstructions, such as virtual museums and the Church of Santa Chiari. David Pirro (Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics, Graz) described IEM’s Embodied Generative Music project, aimed at furthering the understanding of the relationship between bodily and musical expression. The primary interest in these presentations for me was in seeing the range of mocap projects as well as realising the possibilities of collaboration between universities and corporations. Considering HUMlab’s own research inclinations, particularly with respect to the expanded facilities and possibilities at HUMlab X, the ambit of ideas re mocap technologies was inspiring and thought-provoking.

In the second category, presenters showcased the technical developments of mocap systems. Matt Oughten showed us the various cameras and sensors available from Vicon, including the T-series range and the Vicon Bonita – the latter has a record speed of 240 FPS and is small enough to hold in your palm. DK Arvind (University of Edinburgh) presented wireless, full-body 3-D Orient motion capture systems and their usage in a variety of applications, including flamenco dance, golf swings and yoga. This focus on the technical aspects also complemented the demos in the workshop, giving a sense of the practical to the discourse.

The third category was the most interesting, in which speakers presented their own mocap projects. Helen Bailey (University of Bedfordshire) presented her research on the e-Dance project, including an investigation into telematic bodies by dividing images of dancers into a quarter-grid to which movements were mapped to different bodily parts. Iwona Hrynczenko (Gotland University) described to us her not unambitious project to map a database of expressive gestures, presenting an interesting challenge as to how we might capture not just movement, but also its more elusive elements, such as expression and personality. Luiz Naveda (Ghent University) showed a fascinating study on how samba/dance movement might be notated, considering separate paradigms of gesture as shape and topology, while Carlos Guedes (University of Porto) gave an overview of his research extracting movement for the control of musical processes. Gretchen Schiller (Brunel University) presented several interesting ideas on movement, including the mapping process, memory in kinesthesia, and the stillness/movement dialectic. Kirk Woolford (Sussex) also introduced to us his numerous mocap projects involving dance and photography, as well as an overview, with Stuart Dunn (King’s College London), of the Motion in Place Platform (MiPP) project. Finally, Sally Jane Norman (Sussex), who has been working in motion capture research since 1994, gave an insightful history of mocap research and systems in which she had been involved over the years.

While helpful in showcasing some of the academic landscape of mocap projects in European universities and the range of its applications, the workshop was, however, almost entirely skewed towards dance and music, reflecting the research interests of the organisers rather than the wide range of mocap work in other areas such as cinema (which, in the wake of Lord of the Rings, Monster House and Avatar, would be, one would think, an obvious area), sign language, gesture recognition, biomedical analysis, surveillance and sports performance analysis etc. Nevertheless, the workshop managed to attract a diverse audience, and the conversations I had with other scholars and academics from different sub-fields were both helpful and thought-provoking – a great conversation I had with Sarah Rubidge, Professor of Choreography and New Media at University of Chichester, on Whitehead and affect was particularly inspiring. The workshop – with kudos to the main organiser Cecile Chevalier – was also well-run and organised throughout, with generously allotted time for lunch (albeit with the ubiquitous and unimaginative sandwiches which seem de rigeur with English conferences) and coffee breaks. Overall, my impression is that such research initiatives bode well not only for work and development in the technology, but also the inter-disciplinary outreach and collaborative potential of academic projects across the sciences and the humanities in general.

4 Responses to “Motion Capture Methodologies Workshop, 25-26 June 2010, Lighthouse”

” Thank you for your swift and heartening report on this workshop, set up as a small-scale, focussed event to highlight a selection of arts and humanities developments involving motion capture. We had no intention – and certainly not the resources! – to provide an exhaustive overview of the motion capture areas you rightly cite as rich development terrain, so this perhaps accounts for the focus on dance and music (not so much a reflection of the organisers’ own research interests, since we’ve also engaged extensively with sectors you mention, as of the research community that generously accepted to contribute time to this initiative). The soft- and hardware demonstrators our presenters brought to share with others during the break/ demo sessions are happily very generic systems overall, widely used beyond the music and dance domains. We published full abstracts and presenter biographies online as early as possible to give a notion of scope and avoid misleading potential attendees at this free event, so hope others were not disappointed. Of course, I’ve nothing to say in defence of the English sandwich though personally I found the fruit skewers wonderfully refreshing in the heat of the Brighton summer! I’m happy we were able to welcome a Umea attendee, as your research and resources are appreciatively recognised, and hope we’ll be able to connect again in future. With best wishes from Sussex, Sally Jane.”
Sally Jane Norman on June 27th, 2010 at 9:00 pm

I enjoyed reading your report, Jenna. I have followed motion capture developments and some of the critical work, but I certainly appreciated the update. I wonder whether motion capture as a technology (or set of technologies) belongs the same ‘dream’ as CAVEs etc. – realism, full immersion, removal of interface etc.
Patrik Svensson on June 29th, 2010 at 10:52 am

Thanks, Patrik! I think it’s a different kind of “dream” – not so much that of immersive realism, but something more affective, transmissive, expressive. I think of mocap as space in a different sense – as created, carved and negotiated by movement (in becoming), as opposed to immersive, dimensional, realistic. I like the idea of dream – there’s a certain ghostliness and uncanniness in movement which renders it similarly dream-like. I want to explore this further! Thanks for the thought.
Jenna on June 29th, 2010 at 11:36 pm

Dear Professor Norman
Again, my sincere apologies for the delay in publishing your comment… as explained, I was not aware that comments on the blog were moderated plus the administration of the blog was overlooked recently as we broke up for the summer holidays.

Thanks very much again for checking in, and for your comment! Of course, the scope of the event contains its own constraints. It would be great to see a large-scale motion capture conference/event, and see how the technology applies across disciplines… might there be something like that in the pipeline from MiPP…? In any case, the workshop was actually very informative for me personally as, not being my fields, I had not thought much about mocap and dance and music, so I learnt a lot, particularly about movement. I think your project is immensely exciting and I am certainly going to be following your work and the MiPP project with great interest.

You’re right – those fruit skewers were great – I took quite a number…! Actually, the rolls and bagels on the second day were pretty good too and a welcome change. :-) Sorry again for the misunderstanding. I look forward to reading more about your work and hope, as well, that we might connect up again sometime in the future. Thanks again for a great and very well-run workshop!

All the best
Jenna
jenna on July 10th, 2010 at 2:04 pm

Tags: , , , , , , ,
No Comments »

by Kirk Woolford

Motion Capture Methodologies Workshop: June 2010

June 18, 2010 in digital media, event, featured, interdisciplinary, motion capture by Kirk Woolford

The University of Sussex is delighted to host an interdisciplinary workshop on motion capture, as part of the methodologies workshop series organised by UK higher education bodies AHESSC (Arts & Humanities e-Science Support Centre) and JISC, in collaboration with the Motion in Place Platform Project. These events share experience and interests across specific digital development sectors that are nurturing research in the arts and humanities.

This workshop will consist of brief plenary presentations on projects and their technical environments interspersed with informal networking sessions and ample time for questions and discussion. Motion capture resources and related software products will be available for demonstrations and project-oriented discussions. A reception organised in partnership with Lighthouse on the evening of Friday 25 June will provide fur ther networking opportunities with regional cultural representatives.

Workshop presenters
DK Arvind. Research Consortium in Speckled Computing, School of Informatics University of Edinburgh.
Helen Bailey. Division of Performing Arts and English, University of Bedfordshire.
Stuart Dunn. AHeSSC, King’s College London.
Donald Glowinski. InFoMus Lab, Faculty of Engineer ing, University of Genoa.
David Green. Culture Lab, Newcastle University.
Carlos Guedes. Escola Superior de Música e das Artes do Espectáculo, Instituto Politécnico do Porto.
Iwona Hrynczenko. Department of Game Development, Gotland University.
Ali Kord. Animazoo, Brighton.
Sally Jane Norman. Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, University of Sussex.
Matt Oughton, Vicon, Oxford.
David Pirrò. Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics, Graz.
Gretchen Schiller. School of Ar ts, Brunel University.
Martin White. School of Informatics, University of Sussex.
Kirk Woolford. School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex.

How to attend
This workshop is free of charge and can accommodate approximately 50 participants in total. We request prompt notification from persons wishing to attend for the 2 full days (beginning at 9:30am Friday 25 June and ending at 4pm on Saturday 26 June 2010). Given high demand and limited capacity, only persons fully committed to attend should register .

Start date: 25 Jun 2010 09:30
End date: 26 Jun 2010 16:00
Venue: Lighthouse
City: Brighton

Tags: , ,
No Comments »

by Kirk Woolford

MiPP Project: Motion in Place Platform

June 4, 2010 in archaeology, body, dance, embodiment, field recording, motion capture, photography, site by Kirk Woolford

We are pleased to announce the start of a new project to develop a Motion in Place Platform enabling the study of relationships between human movement and site.
Over the course of the next year, the team will develop two tracking systems to capture different forms of motion data: high resolution full-body data obtained from 2 people in a fixed area over limited periods of time (e.g., the sequence of movements needed to bring water from a well to a hearth or the movements needed to cross a crowded intersection); and positional data gathered from many people moving over large areas and over extended time scales (e.g., the movements of a team of archaeologists over an entire 6 week dig, or the movement of visitors around a city park). Researchers will work together with Brighton-based motion capture company, “Animazoo” to adapt their studio-based motion capture systems for use in the field while simultaneously developing capture software for the Apple iPhone to provide a readily available system for capturing data from large groups.
Up to now, the main research tools available for this type of work have been cameras and GPS loggers. Some researchers have gone a step further and build 3-D models or create virtual fly-throughs allowing people to look at buildings and sites from different viewpoints, but many concede that, the truly human aspect, the behaviour and experience of place, is lost. In order to get a truly embodied understanding of what they intend to build, to study, to appreciate the scale and orientation of a space, or the relationships of the people within it, researchers of all disciplines must walk the site.

Tags: , , , ,
No Comments »