Seeing a user through its avatar
Just read this article from PO Carles and it’s really fun to see how so many people are heading in the same direction with different approaches.
Camtrax is using a webcam to detect objects in your hands and have you interact with the game through their motion.
Pros : only requires a webcam
Cons: You need to be far enough from the webcam (i.e. my Macbook webcam only sees the head not the upper body as i’m staying too close), it requires colored stuff to detect and track, it’s not really motion capture i.e. that won’t give you enough data to recreate a proper avatar motion.
Kapor has come up with a highly special webcam that can measure depth – I had a demo of this at CES 2008 and it really works great. Still you got to be staying a a distance from the cam but the motion capture is pretty good as it almost can see the body parts in 3D. Yet that requires a special hardware and an unnatural gaming position.
At VR-WEAR we are focusing on emotions and body language to give a soul to your avatar and as cajuntechie on Seesmic said “let people see a user through their avatar”. By using a simple webcam we analyze live the facial expression of the user, mouth, eyes, eyebrows and extract qualitative information about its attitude and map them on the avatars face. Webcam is cool for the facial language, but not for the rest of the body though. For that part we have some cool ideas but I won’t disclose them before 2009.
Technorati Tags: emotions, Second Life
