CGMan

First Hours with the Perception Neuron

Added 2016-09-09 03:19:22 +0000 UTC

This is all technical stuff so you can skip this posting if you don't care about the nitty-gritties.

So normally motion capture is super expensive because they use multiple cameras looking at balls stuck on a mo-cap suit. Thousands of dollars.

The Perception Neuron is the first mo-cap solution for the little guy. It is right at $1000. The reason it is cheaper is because it uses gyroscopic sensors like you have in your smartphone. No cameras.

While it is cheaper it does have a few drawbacks. Very fast motions will not record accurately and will need to be cleaned up by hand. People who use it to record martial-art moves frequently need to clean up the raw data. Another more interesting problem is you can not use this near any kind of electro-magnetic fields. If they are around it will give errors in the recording. I should be 3.3 feet away from all speakers, computers, refrigerators, TVs, etc. That is a problem for me. This place is a minefield of technology in every room. Even worse is these fields can magnetize the motion sensors after prolonged exposure rendering them useless.

Fortunately, there is a solution for this. I can go outside and perform the motions. I can plug a mobile phone battery into it and the data will be saved to a MicroSD card that I can later bring into my computer.

I have installed the drivers and chatted with other Perception Neuron users but that is as far as I have gotten today. When the sun is out I will put everything together and do a test record.

Meanwhile I am in the middle of drawing the 2nd image for the GXPT2 story. It's looking nice. That's it for now. Stay tooned! :)