MoCap

Motion capture (commonly called MoCap) is the digital recording of a real person’s or object’s movements so those motions can be used later in 3D productions and XR applications. In 3D workflows the captured motion is mapped to a character’s skeleton or rig and then cleaned and retargeted so the animation behaves correctly in a scene. In XR MoCap is used to drive realistic avatars and interactive animations either in real time or as recorded data, with concerns such as latency, occlusion and tracking accuracy being important technical considerations.

Imagine a team wants a game character to walk and fight with natural movement: they put an actor in a MoCap suit (optical or IMU) and record several takes. The raw motion is then solved in a MoCap tool, cleaned of jitter and mapped (retargeted) to the game character’s rig, then imported into Unity or Unreal for use. For an XR application the same workflow can be adapted for real-time streaming so a user’s head and body motions drive an avatar in VR/AR during interactive sessions.