The Motion Moving Motion Capture

The Introduction As the entertainment industry continues to grow, many interesting and exceptional developments are being made to further the desire to produce fluid, life like, realistic animations. As a result of the increases in computational technology the quest to develop these techniques has accelerated within the past 10 to 15 years. Perhaps the newest realization has been the development of a process called motion capture. Motion capture has been around since the late 1970s, where it was then called rotoscoping and was used by Walt Disney in the film Snow White (Sturman). To begin with, the term “motion capture” actually has many different names, such as mocap, performance animation, performance capture, virtual theater, digital puppetry, real-time animation, and the favorite among traditional key frame animators is “The Devil’s Rotoscope” (Furniss). Motion capture, in its most basic form, is the technique of digitally recording the movements of real organisms, usually humans and then applying those movements to some other media (Polhemus). What motion capture allows animators to do is capture the movements of people or animals to create digital models with more realistic movements. Although this description seems have the obvious preference towards animation in entertainment realms the technique of motion capture has many other areas of application, such as biomechanics, sport performance analysis, tele-robotics, ergonomics, entertainment and so on (Animation World Magazine). Throughout the remainder of this paper a more in depth look at the history, processes, types, new developments, and applications of motion capture to help give a more clear representation of exactly what motion capture is and where it is going.
The History
The use of motion capture for computer character animation is relatively new, having begun in the late 1970 's, and only now becoming widespread. The need to capture motion has been acknowledged for decades in a variety

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