Motion capture is a widely used technique to record the movement of the human body. Indeed, the technique has become ubiquitous in areas such as sports science, where it is used to analyze movement and gait, as well as in movie animation and gaming, where it is used to control computer-generated avatars.
As a result, an entire industry exists for analyzing movement in this way, along with cheap, off-the-shelf equipment and software for capturing and handling the data. “There is a huge community of producers and consumers of motion capture, countless databases and stock animation resources, and a rich ecosystem of proprietary and open-source software tools to manipulate them,” say Ingmar Steiner at Saarland University in Germany and a few pals.
