The motion capture system at Palmer High School is an optical tracking system from Vicon, whose equipment is used by Electronic Arts, Industrial Light and Magic, and others.
In 2015 I was encouraged to apply for a grant from the Colorado Springs Rotary Club as part of their Flight CS initiative, a program aimed at helping support schools and the community by auctioning off butterflies created by artists for installations around the city. I crafted a grant request to bring live action motion capture to my school program as a way to speed up our animation process as well as open opportunities for students to engage with visual effects career opportunities. The Flight grant was successful with $20,300 being set aside for Palmer to purchase a motion capture system and Vicon more than doubled the grant through donations, price discounts, and technical support. In addition, the district Career and Technical Education department and Palmer High School invested in a truss and our principal invested in computer upgrades to run the software as well. We now have the same kind of system that is used by Electronic Arts and the same software used by Industrial Light and Magic. This is a huge boon for our program thanks to the generosity of these various parties.
For those who might not know what motion capture is, this system allows us to translate the movement of actors and props in 3D space into a computer and then map that information onto a model. This is one of the ways that animators create special effects with digital characters like those seen in the Polar Express, Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Transformers. This is also a technology used in video game creation, which has surpassed the movie industry in scope and profits. An actor puts on a suit with small reflective balls and the cameras of the system shoot near infrared light at the balls and look for the reflection of the light. Multiple cameras triangulate the position of the balls in space and record their movement.
In class students have the chance to put on the suit, write, direct, act, clean up, and produce short animations for use in games and animated features. The system has been used with high school, middle school, and elementary students since its inclusion in the program in February of 2016. Check out the animations and blog postings categorized under “Motion Capture” for more information on how the hardware and software are being used by students in the program.