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SPECIAL MOCAP SECTION system. The detail in the eye that it provides brings characters to life." Testing DigiDouble Shells Some of House of Moves' most interesting film work has centered on digital doubles, with dop- pelgangers for Journey 2: The Mysterious Is- land actors Dwayne Johnson, Michael Caine, Josh Hutcherson, Vanessa Hudgens, and Luis Guzman setting the stage. First, Icon Imaging Studio's scanners captured the costumed actors' topology, and the USC Institute for Creative Technologies' Light Stage captured textures and lighting. A custom process lined up the 3D scans with the geometric lighting and texture infor- mation using reference points. In other words, they created a photorealistic shell—a surface representation of each actor in costume. Then, the actors walked across the street to House of Moves for full-body motion capture. "[The pro- duction team] wanted to be sure the range of motion worked," Rausch says. House of Moves artists applied the motion to a skeleton they placed inside the shell. "We test- ed the shell," Rausch says. "The groundbreaking part is that there were no revisions." Journey 2 visual effects supervisor Boyd Shermis gave the resulting dataset with high-resolution geometry, texturing, lighting, and a skeleton with a funda- mental range of motion to all the visual effects studios working on the project to use in their shots and to animate as needed. The House of Moves, which offers optical motion capture using as many as 300 Vicon T160s, has developed a system that moves data directly into the Unreal game engine to let directors see final characters moving with real-time capture data in final environments. T160s," Rausch says. "We're not looking for other ways to capture. Marker data is faster, cheaper, easier." In fact, it's about to become even faster when Vicon rolls out its next version of its software. "We're at the beginning of something new," says Phil Elderfield, entertainment product manager at Vicon. "We're working on a prod- uct called Axiom, which is not a broadly an- nounced name yet. Everything having to do with capturing something is completely new. The first evidence of what Axiom is capable of will be a new real-time system robust enough to allow continuous, uninterrupted shoot- ing, so people can focus on the shoot, not the technology. We want the performers to be able to see themselves in real time, respond to their performance and adapt, and have that momentum continue without having to stop to fix something. Moving forward, we plan better integration of reference cameras and 26 April/May 2012 other capture devices, like gloves and helmets, in sync. The platform we're developing will al- low for that." In addition to drawing from Vicon's enter- tainment division, House of Moves has brought in equipment from the life-science side: an EOG (electro-oculography) mea- surement system with Vicon's Nexis medical application. The EOG tracks eye motion by cap- turing the signal sent from some- one's brain to the eye muscle, and then converts that analog wave into digital data that can rotate digital eyeballs. This is particularly interesting to game developers. "We're doing full-blown eye- ball capture," Rausch says. "I'd say that 95 percent of the cap- ture at House of Moves is full- performance capture, and of that, 80 percent are using the EOG Giant Steps for Film Production Consistently at the center of some of the most innovative uses of motion capture during film production has been one facility: Giant Stu- dios. Giant Studios' systems helped capture actors' performances for Steven Spielberg's Tintin, George Miller's Happy Feet 2, Shawn Levy's Real Steel, James Cameron's Avatar— all told, 31 films, with more under way. Vicon's optical systems are widely used in VFX houses for postproduction and in game development studios. The company is concentrating now on providing high-quality data for real-time previs and continuous shooting in virtual production.