While I’m trying to finish off a website for a friend of mine, John Hill, and that still is taking top priority in my spare time, those of you who know me, know I teach part time over at ITT. Far from the most glamorous teaching position in the world, but I enjoy it. Free time seems to be more and more of a luxury these days.

Either way, I got into a discussion with my class the other night, and they were talking about how it was suggested before they started school that the college either had on site, or had access to, a mocap facility. After a long discussion about how a mocap studio wont make you better animator, which I firmly believe, I remembered an idea I had several months earlier.

The idea was to try to construct a primitive yet functional motion capture system using mostly off the shelf products. The Wii Remote is little more than a simplified IR 1024×768 camera. The best part is that the Wii Remote does most of the heavy lifting and can keep track of 4 distinct IR light sources. Using multiple Wii Remotes, and a custom build IR suit rig, you should be able to toggle just 4 points on the suit each frame and still get a decent sampling rate across the entire suit.

Last night in class, I started working on a prototype. I’ll post some photos as work progresses.