Hey everyone, Ben here from StretchSense.
I wanted to talk about the performance of motion capture gloves.
You see, here at StretchSense, we are relentlessly focused –
I mean, RELENTLESSLY focused on making the world’s highest performing motion capture gloves.
But I realized we haven’t actually talked much about what performance actually means,
why it matters so much and what we’re doing differently about it.
If you look at a human hand, there’s an incredible variety of different movements that it can make.
I can spread my fingers, I can bend them, my thumb and finger can interact, my fingers can interact,
my palm can collapse in interesting ways, my knuckles can move...
and that’s before we even go into picking up objects, holding props, using tools and what have you.
So, hands are very complicated.
In a high performing motion capture system,
what it will do is it will capture the highest number of those different complicated movements.
If you think about it, maybe a hand can move a hundred different unique little subtle ways,
a high performing motion capture system will capture, say, all hundred
and then deploy them directly, without the need for cleanup, into final animated content.
A low performing system, you'll try to capture those same movements and it won’t deploy them directly into final content.
The quality will be low, you’ll need to clean up, you’ll need to spend time, money and effort doing that.
So why does this matter to a studio?
I think there’s really 4 key things that really matter. So, the first is time.
If you have a low performing finger mocap solution, what’s gonna happen is you’re gonna have to pay your animators to sit there,
sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months on a big project, cleaning up the bad, low-quality data that you just got.
This adds enormous time to the creative cycle.
Instead of seeing something quickly, like maybe the day after you’ve shot it or even the same day,
you have to wait weeks or months to see it; that slows down the creative cycle of the studio,
it pushes out deadlines and timelines and it reduces the amount of work the studio can actually do.
So, the biggest advantage of high performing motion capture gloves or finger tracking solutions is the time saving,
so it’s how much faster your business can run, how much more creative and agile that you can be.
The second big advantage is that if you don’t have a high performing system and your animators are working on cleanup,
they're not really being maximally creative, right?
If you think about it, animators didn’t go to school to clean up messy,
crappy data that they captured from a bad mocap performance.
They actually wanna create new and novel IP, and well, be creative.
Having high performing mocap data frees them up and gives them more time to do things
that are actually value additive, create new IP for the studio.
The third thing is stress. It really sucks to go and spend the whole day doing a motion capture shoot –
you know, getting people in, getting them set up, running the whole thing...
and then you have no idea through it if you’re gonna get garbage at the end of the day.
You know, we could all live with that stress, but that’s not really fun. That’s not nice.
It’s much better to have a high performing system and you actually can have confidence
that what you put in is what you’re gonna get out.
And then the final thing is money.
Obviously, paying people to sit there, cleaning up bad motion capture performances is expensive,
it costs studios a lot of money and we really wanna minimize that.
So here at StretchSense, we have a novel, new-to-market type of stretchable sensor technology.
These sensors are WONDERFUL for measuring fingers and unlike legacy systems,
they don’t suffer from occlusion, they don’t suffer from drift and they don’t impede the motion of an actor’s hand.
So that's really cool!
With that strong, robust, accurate, comfortable sensor foundation,
we can use machine learning in a way that no one else in the market can.
So when we have a new sensor design, a new glove design, a new piece of machine learning software,
we actually put the gloves on the test group of people; they move their hand around
and we look and see how many of those key poses or those key movements does the glove actually capture
with a high enough fidelity that it can be used directly in final animated content.
Our gloves get better over time as we add more data to them,
and they can learn and be customized to the output that an individual studio actually wants.
So you put all this together, we’re SUPER proud of the progress that we’ve made
in our quest to making the PERFECT pair of motion capture gloves.
And we’re so proud of it, we’re very comfortable to have people try them out.
So if you’d like to have a go at our technology, just drop us a line at www.stretchsense.com
We’ll send you a trial pair and you can get started.
Thanks everyone, happy mocaping!