Hello everyone,
I am planning to build a web application that you might find interesting, and would be very glad to hear peoples thoughts about it.
The web application would allow users to insert real time motion capture effects to their live video stream.
My goal is to have people without animating skills to create video content with motion capture effects.
I would like to know
1.) Would the creators of rigged character models be interested in offering your models at such web site? My plan is to offer 3d models to be used in web application for very low price. Your models would reach wider audience who would use them and and even wider audience who would see them. Users of the web application would have to place the link to your full price models in the video description, so those interested in using your models professionally could buy the models for your full price.
2.) Would people browsing the models be interested in real time motion capture preview? How do you currently examine and evaluate models?
3.)Would you even be interested in using such a web application?

Capturing 3D motion requires at least two cameras, preferably more. Even calibrated equipment brings a lot of noise which needs to be cleaned up.

I don't know of even experimental attempts at this using commodity webcams usually found on web.

Capturing 3D motion requires at least two cameras, preferably more.

... or no cameras

At first we would use Microsoft Kinect, which is a depth camera.
And currently there is a research at MIT and Stanford which would use just 1 regular camera, but that is planned further down the road.

At first we would use Microsoft Kinect, which is a depth camera.
And currently there is a research at MIT and Stanford which would use just 1 regular camera, but that is planned further down the road.

I think someone released a simple mocap solution using 3 kinect cameras. I think their software was not cheap, but I remember seeing something about it.

I had limited success with the Brekel software. Desktop motion cap is a hard thing to get right, but if you pull it off and can develop a good way of integrating the data into the development pipeline, I'll provide a few characters.

Character preview in real time would be a pretty sweet application.

...are you also suggesting real time recording?

Capturing 3D motion requires at least two cameras

Not really.

[quote name='Antheus' timestamp='1334951602' post='4933332']
Capturing 3D motion requires at least two cameras

Not really.
[/quote]

Yes, for static scenes. A moving camera is only one, but if plotted through 4th dimension (aka time), you get many cameras, 25 per second of recording or so.

Motion however cannot be reconstructed, at least not without understanding of context, such as recognizing human motion and using heuristics to estimate the position.

Yes, for static scenes.

I read motion capture several times yet somehow ended up with surface reconstruction in my head - apologies!