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Motion Capture Toolkit

With the Jack Motion Capture Toolkit, engineers can interact with their virtual environments in real-time to quickly develop the most human friendly designs or procedures.

What is the Motion Capture Toolkit?

  • The Jack Motion Capture (MoCap) Toolkit allows users to take advantage of sophisticated motion tracking technology for their human modeling needs. Motion tracking systems consist of special hardware designed to track the motions of objects. With a sufficient number of sensors, human whole body postures can be tracked. Even items like tools can be tracked at the same time. The data from these systems can be used to posture Jack in the virtual environment in real-time. The functionality to communicate with hardware systems, and the interpretation and utilization of the data, is available in the Motion Capture Toolkit. In addition, the MoCap toolkit also provides support for the Immersion Cyberglove to capture individual finger motions, and head mounted displays.
  • With the MoCap Toolkit, engineers, designers or users can be immersed in a virtual design to evaluate the human factors issues first hand. Since the user actually interacts with the design, usability issues can be quickly discovered and corrected before costly prototypes are built.
  • Complex postures and movements can be recorded and used for later analysis or training.

Business Value

  • Understanding the true movement of humans is a significant advantage when designing new products and manufacturing tasks. With Jack and MoCap, design teams can place real subjects into the virtual environment to see how people will perform assigned tasks or interact with product designs. For example, by tracking a real person doing the task, a design team can simulate and analyze the motions of the human as they drive a truck or service a machine.
  • Engineers also can gain significant value by interacting with their designs first-hand. The experience can help to identify human factors issues that quickly become apparant when attempting an operation in person.
  • The real-time human performance analysis tools available Jack can be run simulataneously to rapidly evaluate if the observed motions will put a user at elevated risk of injury.
  • The Motion Capture Toolkit provides the tools necessary to connect with motion-tracking hardware, use the data to animate the humans in the scene, and shortcuts to useful Jack functionality.

Key Benefits

  • Experience your designs as the user will, while still in the virtual world!
  • Evaluate different loading conditions, without risking injury
  • Rapidly find usability issues with your design concepts
  • Record and play back complex human motion sequences
  • Establish training and service procedures prior to physical build availability

Overview

  • At times, a designer may want to model human motions that are very complex, or motions that contain movement nuances that are difficult to predict, such as differences between a short and tall person performing a task. As design decisions will be based on the simulation analysis, it is important to model these situations as accurately as possible. The Jack Motion Capture Toolkit add-on provides the functionaliity to help with these analysis needs.
  • With the MoCap toolkit, Jack users can take advantage of the latest technology in human motion tracking from the leading suppliers of this technology. With this functionality, markers are placed on bony landmarks of the person (such as the elbow, knees, shoulders) and tracked by the motion capture hardware. Critical information is computed by these systems and sent to Jack via the MoCap interface. Within Jack, the data are interpreted and used to match the movement of the Jack figure to the movements of the subject, all in real-time!
  • The views from Jack's eyes can be output to a Head Mounted Display so that the subject sees what Jack sees, and can investigate the virtual environment. Reaching to objects, looking into bins, even picking up virtual tools and working with them can be done. All Jack functionality including collision detection and human performance models are available during an immersive session, so sophisticated analyses can be performed very rapidly, including clearance investigations of a person with tools, reachability, visibility and injury risk assessment.
  • The recording functionality allows motions to be captured, and played back for later analysis or design review.

Supported Motion Tracking Hardware

  • Ascension MotionStar, Flock Of Birds
  • Motion Analysis Corporation
  • Vicon Motion Systems
  • Immersion Cybergloves
  • Head Mounted Display

System Requirements

Platform Recommended Configuration Notes Win XP Dual Head Graphics card required for HMD stereo SGI Irix 6.5.x Motion Analysis Corp System not supported on SGI. Vicon system requires separate PC in addition to SGI Ascension Flock of Birds not supported on SGI
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