I will participate in a motion capture workshop at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) tomorrow. My contribution will consist of the following:

  • Lecture: Introduction to motion capture (in music analysis and performance)
  • Demo 1: Working with video analysis using the Musical Gestures Toolbox
  • Demo 2: The Xsens MVN BioMech mobile mocap suit
  • Workshop: Analysis and performance with Wii controllers, Phidgets accelerometers and Kinect

Below are various resources.

Introduction

PDF of the presentation.

Demo 1: Musical Gestures Toolbox

The Musical Gestures Toolbox is a collection of modules and abstractions developed in and for the graphical programming environment Max. The toolbox is currently being developed within the Jamoma open platform for interactive art-based research and performance.

Download: Jamoma + UserLib and Max

The toolbox is probably most useful for people that are already familiar with Max programming. People looking for more easy-to-use solutions can check out some of my standalone applications at the fourMs software page. These applications should work on most versions of OSX, as well as on WinXP. I know that there are various issues with Windows Vista and Windows 7, and will try to get these problems ironed out as soon as possible.

Demo 2: XSens

Xsens MVN BioMech is a mobile mocap suit based on inertial sensors (accelerometer, gyroscopes, magnetometers). It excels over camera-based systems in that it is portable and allows for mobile motion capture. I will show how the system can be used both for analysis and performance:

  • Analysis: mocap recordings will be made with the internal Xsens software, and exported to C3D files that will be imported in Matlab using the Mocap Toolbox.

  • Performance: I will also show how the system can be used in realtime, passing data to Max within which the packets will be parsed and used to control sound in realtime.

Workshop:

During the hands-on workshop, participants will be able to try out the above mentioned tools and systems, as well as:

  • Phidgets USB motion sensors.

  • Nintendo Wii controllers, which allow for wireless inertial motion sensing. Here there are several tools available.

    • OSCulator a general purpose tool for reading data from various human interface devices.
    • WiiDataCapture can record data coming from OSCulator, and format them so that they can easily be imported by the MoCap Toolbox
    • junXion is an application for passing on either OSC or MIDI from Wii controllers and other human interface devices.

  • Microsoft Kinect sensor, which allows for inexpensive “3D” motion capture using depth-cameras.

    • Wiki page describing how to work with Kinect in Max