A few months back we met an innovative technologist Ramaprasanna. Hailing from Bangalore the IT city, Rama has created a number of geeky hobby projects and today we take a look at his latest hack. This time Rama has ventured into the animation space with a motion tracking based animation solution.
If you look at traditional 3D animation, it works by attaching sensors to ones body and recording movements. But this might just become a thing of the past with 3D motion tracking enabled by Kinect. Using a custom code and a Kinect sensor, Ramaprasanna eliminates traditional motion tracking using sensors fixed on ones body (see image below). Thus reducing the cost and time of producing such animated movies by a huge margin.
The video below shows a couple of animated characters dancing on screen. They were created by Ramaprasanna himself standing in front of the Kinect sensor and recording the dance. This is possible by the tracking Microsoft’s Kinect sensor provides by reading 48 skeletal points on your body. A little fun editing later, you can see Rama and the animated character dancing together.
Getting a person replaced by animated character on a live video is the next logical step and we have been assured that whenever next Ramaprasanna has a weekend off, that wold happen too.
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