3D Motion Capture Recreates Yankees Closer
Thanks to advanced motion capture technology, there may be a new way for baseball scouts to study players, the government to track terrorists and marketers to better analyze consumer behaviors.
Motion capture technology analyzes human movements through animated 3-D images. As head of New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences’ Movement Laboratory, Chris Bregler, an associate professor, lives and breathes it every day.
Recently, Bregler and his seven-person research team used videos of New York Yankees pitcher Mariano Rivera to recreate a 3D reconstruction of his skeletal motion for The New York Times. Traditionally, 3-D motion capture has been done in a controlled studio environment. Movie studios and video game makers have put their subjects in special suits with light reflecting markers to recreate a 3-D animated movement.
Doing this sort of work in a baseball stadium wasn’t practical, so Bregler and company had to use other methods to create the 3-D animated motion capture of Rivera’s pitches. They used different camera angles of Rivera pitching from past games and what Bregler calls special “trickery,” to synchronize Rivera’s movements from ordinary video.
