I have been playing with the motion capture, and although my first experiments produced rather disappointing results, practice and experimentation, as well as laying down animations in multiple layers for different body parts has improved dramatically the results I have received. This practice has forced me to face a few limitations of the device and software, but also given me a list of relatively minor improvements that would lead to a substantially more usable product. In no particular order:

1. Time delay before recording. One of the things I love about iClone is the fact that I, as an individual, can do things that just years ago would take a team of people to accomplish. Working by myself, however, leaves me oftentimes with nobody to press the space key for me to begin recording. As a result, every captured animation begins with my avatar reaching over to press the space key. While you can cut this out of the animation, it would be substantially easier to just have a countdown timer that would allow you time to position yourself/your avatar before the recording starts.

2. Smoothing. The realtime nature of the capture and the limitations of the capture device/software tends to make captured motions extremely "twitchy" compared to manually animated motions. It would be really nice to have some sort of smoothing filter that could be applied to captured animations after the capture to provide for variable smoothing of the actions to make the motions appear less spastic.

3. Limb calibration: Maybe it's just my body shape/proportions, but I find that when I capture myself with my arms straight at my sides, my avatar's arms protrude at about 30 degrees from the torso. While this can be manually corrected by editing the motion layer, it makes capture a bit of a challenge. Just like the driver captures an H pose, it should be possible to have a character calibration, where your character appears on the screen, and presents several different poses for you to mimic, and the captured information could be used to adjust your animation prior to capture so that the avatar's 1) arms go straight down/up when your arms are straight down/up, that your avatars fingers touch when you touch your fingers together, that your legs come together when you stand with your feet together, etc. This simple act of calibration would make interaction with a virtual environment much more intuitive, and would eliminate a great deal of motion layer editing.

4. Time dilation. Sometimes there is a complicated motion that needs to be captured (for example, some dance steps), that the sad human operator (i.e. me) is incapable of adequately performing in realtime. A feature that would allow the capture to be made in "slow motion" and then played realtime would be useful for capturing complicated or precise motions.


The mocap wishlist is endless, but these seemed like four improvements that could be made relatively easily.

NOT easy to implement, but would be awesome:

5. Multiple camera/Kinect support. The ability to simultaneously use two or three kinects or cameras to create more accurate 360 degree motion capture

6. Gesture track capture. A hand/gesture capture made using closeup views of the hands would substantially speed the animation process where hands play a large part of the animation, and would even open the doors for using the product for producing sign-language animations (although two captures would need to be made, one for the arms, and the other to lay the gestures down.

7. Wheelchair support. Some people cannot enter the H pose. It would be really nifty if an alternate capture mode could be created to calibrate and track only the upper body. Leg animation could be captured in a second pass using arms.

I've been using iClone since version 2, and I've had more fun playing during the last couple of weeks with Version 5 and the motion capture plugin than I had with any of the then-new features of the prior versions. I hope that some/all of these features make their way into the motion capture product soon.