In light of global pandemic challenges, creative solutions that are suitable for home use are gaining popularity. Because markerless motion capture does not require expensive equipment, dedicated studio space and can be operated by one person, it is an ideal solution for remote work. It is a convenient and viable option for fast prototyping, and it can help companies to stay on schedule and boost creativity despite existing limitations and organizational uncertainty. This is why I expect to see growth in the number of markerless mocap users in the coming year.
Game Engines
Continued Unity and Unreal game engine adoption across various industries affords content creators numerous advantages. In motion capture, our iPi Mocap solution is compatible with both engine technologies, offering realtime live preview and live steaming that makes it possible to see how the captured motion will look on a 3D character. This improves acting performance and saves time by avoiding multiple acting/tracking/motion transfer iterations.
Technology
AI-based tracking algorithms and tech is a very promising direction for motion capture tools for AR/VR applications. We see great potential in combining AI-based with traditional mocap algorithms to improve user experience and increase tracking quality. It is a difficult task and there is still a long way to go.
GPU-based computations are extensively used in modern computer vision/motion tracking algorithms. The continued growth of GPU computational power provided by Nvidia, AMD, Intel and other industry leaders is an exciting trend. Nvidia recently announced significant performance enhancements to its GeForce 30 series, as compared to the previous generation. All of this is promising news for our markerless motion capture development. I'm also enthusiastic about cloud computing advances. With rapidly increasing network bandwidths, in-cloud computations for motion-capture pipelines are just around the corner. I expect cloud computing will someday allow us to enjoy professional mocap applications on our smartphones.
Metaverse Game Play
Our current system has limited capability for use in the AR/VR context, but we're working on algorithms that will allow us to create new products for this virtual shared space.
Michael Nikonov is the Founder/Chief Creative Architect of iPi Soft (http://ipisoft.com), a markerless motion capture technology developer based in Moscow, Russia.