GDC Friday: Muybridge’s Motion
An Arena dancer dances at GDC 2009.
With time comes perspective on how exactly these new gadgets have changed the world and the corresponding environments we live in. For example, before photography, artists and scientists made inaccurate drawings of horses, anatomically correct at least physically, but not in form or design. Early paintings showed horses and horsemen in contorted positions as it wasn’t then understood how exactly the animal moved through the air while in gallop.
Then came Eadweard Muybridge, a social observer who, through the use of photography, created a way to make image sequences of a variety of animals and objects in motion. It was through his pioneering studies that scientists and artists could finally depict a horse’s gallop with any sort of accuracy.
Scientists have been using what is known as gait analysis for years now, studying human locomotion with video cameras beginning in the 70s and progressing through the current day. With this technology, pathological conditions with physical effects like cerebral palsy and neuromuscular disorders could be studied and orthopedic doctors had the ability to observe patients’ rehabilitation progress.
And at GDC 2009, we were on hand for some of the latest developments in the long line of movement analysis. One example was a company called Arena, whose booth was manned with a pair of dancers decked out in black spandex and white dots, twisting and shaking to loud music pumping from nearby speakers. On a screen behind them were digital avatars, dancing accordingly and mimicking each of their movements.
In a nutshell, reference markers are placed at the dancer’s joints, and their movements are captured by a camera which samples the actor many times per second, relaying their movements through a computer system and displaying their respective avatar onscreen.
Actually, there were a few exhibits like this, each with slight variations on the theme, and it’s certainly of note that this is nothing new to movie studios that have been mapping actor’s movements for animation and computer-generated graphics for years.
But these companies were linked in their signaling the future of motion analysis –this is technology that’s beginning to become available to a more widespread audience as it gets commercialized. Of course, there are pros and cons to the whole thing – cost is certainly one of them.
In addition, there are quite a few applications this tech can be applied to, and I’ll touch on both those and the pros and cons in tomorrow’s post, so stay tuned…
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