Last year, the School of Visual Arts was given over $100,000 to build a motion capture room in the Norick Art Center.
Jeff Price, professor of digital design, said the room was finished only a week before OCU went online in spring. He said students and faculty are just now able to explore the technology.
“We have a class now called ‘motion imagery,’ so we’ll be using the room for that class next spring,” Price said. “I have a student right now that’s learning it in an independent study, and at the very beginning of this semester, we had a couple of theater professors come over and show interest in it for maybe documenting some acting.”
Price said the application of the technology, while oriented towards entertainment, has collaborative opportunities between many parts of the university.
“The ability to work with athletes and life sciences are going to be great opportunities for our school to be innovative,” Price said.
Price said there were several motion capture systems to choose from, but Vicon offered the most opportunities.
“For the most part, the system is mostly cameras and software. So, the true tech is how much fidelity the cameras have and how integrated it is with the software,” Price said.
Price said the cameras have to have a high enough resolution to enable the software to accurately pinpoint the independent parts of the body. If the software is confused, the data becomes messy, and the applications of the technology are limited.
“This Vicon system is smart enough to keep track of your hands and stuff like that, so it’s less work on the back end,” Price said.
Price said having this room provides both recruitment opportunities for future students and job opportunities for current students.
“It definitely is a game changer for a program to have the ability to do motion capture. That’s sort of the next level in terms of entertainment technology,” Price said. “Having our students come, and being able to learn that and then go out into the field and get jobs in motion capture would really be the goal of what we’re doing.”
Evan Barreiro, game design and animation senior, has been using the room to develop a game level.
“I’m going to be recording different animations to use for the character as they walk around the scene,” Barreiro said.
Barreiro said he had very little experience with motion capture technology before taking the motion imagery class last year. He said the technology is not hard to pick up, and he looks forward to job opportunities made available by having a background with motion capture.
“This past spring, I helped the guy from Vicon set it up, and he was telling me how this is a great way to get jobs in the industry because not many people know it,” Barreiro said. “If you learn the hardware, you can get a job at a company doing hardware and eventually transition into another role.”
Barreiro said motion capture will have an increasingly significant role within entertainment.
“For most video games, film, and animation, it will just be motion capture, instead of a person having to go in and create all the animations by hand. That’s probably the future,” Barreiro said.
Price said motion capture has a large range of opportunities, and he hopes other departments at OCU continue to show interest in collaborating with the School of Visual Arts.
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