Lumitrack is a

motion capture Motion capture (sometimes referred as mocap or mo-cap, for short) is the process of recording high-resolution motion (physics), movement of objects or people into a computer system. It is used in Military science, military, entertainment, sports ...

technology developed by Robert Xiao,

Chris Harrison Christopher Bryan Harrison (born July 26, 1971) is an American television and game show host, best known for his role as the host of the American Broadcasting Company, ABC reality television dating show ''The Bachelor (American TV series), Th ...

and Scott Hudson at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

. It combines projectors and sensors to provide high-fidelity motion-tracking. These types of sensors are used in

video game A video game or computer game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface or input device (such as a joystick, game controller, controller, computer keyboard, keyboard, or motion sensing device) to generate visual fe ...

controllers, such as

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

Kinect Kinect is a discontinued line of motion sensing input devices produced by Microsoft and first released in 2010. The devices generally contain RGB color model, RGB cameras, and Thermographic camera, infrared projectors and detectors that map dep ...

, and in

for movie and television production. Although the research prototype of Lumitrack currently uses visible light, it could be adapted to utilize invisible infrared light. According to the university, the sensors require little power and should be cheap to mass-produce. They could even be built into smartphones.

Technology

The projectors cover the tracked area with structured patterns called a binary m-sequence that resemble

barcodes A barcode or bar code is a method of representing data in a visual, Machine-readable data, machine-readable form. Initially, barcodes represented data by varying the widths, spacings and sizes of parallel lines. These barcodes, now commonly ref ...

. The series of bars encodes a series of an assortment of vertical lines of varying thicknesses, without repeating any combination of seven adjacent line types anywhere in the projected image. The sensors read the bars to assess motion. The initial implementation offers sub-millimeter accuracy. When two m-sequences are projected at right angles to each other, the sensor can determine its position in two dimensions; while additional sensors enable 3D tracking. The sensors are simple to manufacture and require little power and features response times in the range of 2.5 milliseconds, making them candidates for incorporation into other devices, such as phones. The sensors can be attached to tracked objects or to fixed objects such as walls.

Applications

The developers target video games as an initial application. Other possibilities include including CGI for movies and television and

human–robot interaction Human–robot interaction (HRI) is the study of interactions between humans and robots. Human–robot interaction is a multidisciplinary field with contributions from human–computer interaction, artificial intelligence, robotics, natural languag ...

References

External links

*{{cite web, url=http://chrisharrison.net/index.php/Research/Lumitrack , title=Lumitrack , publisher=Chris Harrison , date= , accessdate=2013-10-09 Tracking Computing input devices Motion in computer vision