Movea unveils its Motionpods body motion capture system

MOTION CAPTURE FIRM Movea has announced its Motionpod system for accurate and wireless body motion capture.

A Motionpod is about the size of a wristwatch and contains three axis accelerometers, three axis magnetometers and three axis gyroscopes. Up to five Motionpods can be attached to accurately measure the movement of the human body for things like gaming and biomechanical analysis.

Bruno Flament, CTO at Movea said, "By attaching MotionPods on a person's body limbs, our system can track any movement in 3D to a fine degree of accuracy. We have developed a biomechanical model taking into account human constraints such as the fact that a knee can only bend forward,"

"This model therefore can reproduce human body motion realistically and accurately."

The micro-electromechanical system uses proprietary wireless technology instead of something like Bluetooth, mainly to keep power consumption low. The pods send their data to a USB device.

Movea has also developed gesture recognition in the past and with this new system full body gestures are possible. Each Motionpod is 33x22x15mm, weighs 14g and uses a 2.4GHz wireless transmitter.

They work up to a distance of 30 metres and Movea said they can provide up to eight hours of use. The Motionpod has been design to clip onto a bracelet or strap for easy attachment to the body.

To compare it to something like Microsoft's Kinect, Movea said, "For an avatar in a game, Movea's technology speeds up the game action such as taking an arrow out of a quiver and firing it from a bow as the early detection feature recognizes the start of a gesture without having to wait for it to be completed, triggering the game action early and ensure a continuous user experience." µ