Second Life's Stroker Serpentine Bringing MoCap to the Real World

Kevin Alderman,  better known as Stroker Serpentine in Second Life, is a strong case for pointing out success of virtual entrepreneurs. He's successfully navigated several lawsuits regarding his virtual world IP, the products of Strokerz Toyz, and now he's bringing products to the physical world. A personal motion-capture suit aimed at consumers will let users contribute their own animations to whatever actions, sexual or otherwise, they may want in the virtual world. "Right now only a dozen or so sites on the web offer downloadable mocap files," Alderman told Wired. "You have to wait until some studio becomes benevolent enough to make the animations you want, or you have to engage them for your specific needs."

The suit's still expensive for consumers--Wired puts it at about $10,000--but there are other options discussed like Mitch Kapor's Handsfree 3D interface for controlling Second Life with a 3D camera. Kapor said earlier this week that he expects to have the software ready to mirror real-world movements within a month.

The Wired article looks at other applications--not just sex--for MoCap and innovative control systems.

Rick Hall, production director at the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, predicts that MMOGs will be the leaders in creating those interfaces. Of course, users still have to confront their actual physical confines.

"You can swing a baseball bat or kick a football, but you can't go dive, can't run, can't explore a cave," Hall said "We're always going to have this problem. Duplicating the Holodeck on the Enterprise sounds nice, but when they turn the screen off, it's just a big room.... It's not limited by (mocap) technology but by the walls in your house."

Of course, there are other options: like the CyberWalk Treadmill. Or a Holodeck.

[via Wired]

Comments

[Ina Centaur]

Wow, this sounds cool, but for VW's like Second Life, which charges a fee per animation upload (even if the motion were to be as fleeting and often as spammous text chat), how would this work?

[Saijanai]

Ina, my understanding is that Linden Lab charges per upload as a way of throttling uploads.Puppeteering style animation uploading would likely be done without charge, though there would likely be server-side throttling. Also, the research I did on MPEG-4 animation turned up neat pilot projects like text-to-american-sign-language or text-to-gestures, so there's a lot of potential for hybrid realtime/canned systems beyond the hotkey gestures that SL provides right now.