Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/863766
6 cgw j u ly . a u g u s t 2 0 1 7 V I E W P O I N T T here's never been a more exciting time to be in the business of content creation than now. Consumer appetite has exploded with the incredible accessibility that is made possible by mobile devices, on-demand services, low-cost subscriptions, and high-bandwidth delivery. Consumers now have the freedom to demand only what is relevant to them at that moment, with content delivered in near time straight to their retinas and ears. If our purpose as humans is to find better ways to entertain ourselves, we're getting an A. Motion capture gets some of the credit for the point we've reached today. It has helped make CG characters convincingly real for hundreds of films and games. It has enabled sports titles to incor- porate the signature moves of the world's elite players. Today, it's being used in far more inventive ways, one of which is enabling directors to get a real-time view at the "shot" the team is trying to craft – live on set. Such virtual production saves time, money, and has enabled directors to tell their stories in a much more convincing way. You know "mocap" – every- one knows mocap. Reflective markers placed on a perform- er who delivers a real-world performance that is recorded using specialized tracking cam- eras and then used to drive a digital character for a film, visual effect, computer game, and so forth. Even basic mocap has changed dramatically in recent years. The tools and tech- niques that were historically available only to large studios with big budgets are now available to an indie game developer with 20 employees. These smaller studios can install a mocap system in their conference rooms and pro- duce incredibly good character animation in minutes, and at a very low cost. Community col- leges now teach mocap; high schools – even a few junior high schools – are investing in motion capture as an educa- tional platform. It turns out that knowing the position (X, Y, Z location) and orientation (where it's point- ing – Rx, Ry, Rz) of things like people, cameras, set pieces, and even VR headsets has never been a more crucial contributor to the world's growing appetite for entertainment. Mocap has also expanded beyond tracking characters and into tracking cameras and other elements on set. The use of "vir- tual cameras" in CG filmmaking was pioneered famously by James Cameron when he used a rig fitted with passive mocap markers, camera controls, and a display (that produced the real-time CG scene) to nail the exact camera tracks that he desired for each Avatar shot. Putting the (virtual) camera directly into the hands of the director removed the need for on-set communication to oth- ers and delivered the director's exact desired shot. Today, the ways in which teams are employing the tech- nology to tell their stories are becoming even more inventive. For instance, The Jungle Book team chose an extraordinary scale with which to mix live action and CG imagery. Industry insiders know that almost the entire film was shot in a ware- house in downtown Los Angeles, with nearly everything other than the main actor created in CG. To achieve such a feat, live-action cameras and objects were tracked with a massive mocap system, which mea- sured position and orientation with incredible accuracy over extremely large areas. The team then added backgrounds, ani- mals, and other elements with stunning realism. M O C A P I N V R Now, a brand-new category of entertainment is leveraging mocap's core strengths, albeit with a totally different set of performance and usability requirements: virtual reality. The primary immersive ele- ment of VR is the head-mount- ed display (HMD). This is the device that serves up high frame rate images to each eye individually, and through a deep understanding of how our eyes perceive the world, convinces you that you're a participant in an artificial world. Ask anyone who has had to do a simple task like "walk the plank" with a VR headset that is telling their eyes that they're 40 stories above the city streets, but what's really happening (and they know it) is they're standing on a 2x6- inch piece of wood exactly 1.5 inches off the ground. It works. It's the reason why so many people are excited about VR. Humans have astoundingly good visual acuity, so if there are artifacts that are out of place from our visual perspec- tive, our brain tells us it's not real. If our brain is telling us that, BY BRIAN NILLES MOTION CAPTURE AND THE FUTURE OF VR Image courtesy Walt Disney Pictures