Sony has unveiled a new motion capture system that “allows anyone to easily perform full-body tracking in 3D” with six small sensors. What that means is that, with all of them attached to your person, you can turn yourself into an anime girl. Not in real-life, we’re still a ways off doing that yet, but it lets you get that much closer to living the life of a VTuber.
It’s called Mocopi and its new trailer opens with a look at these attachments – they’re colour-coded with labels (such as ankles, hip, head, etc.,) that you then remove from the small container and attach to your person by using bands or by clipping them to clothing. You then sync them up with a bluetooth app and voila, you’re ready to transform.
The trailer, which you can watch below, shows a man transforming into his avatar and dancing around as said avatar in his living room. It swaps back and forth between the real him, his anime girl avatar in his real space, and his anime girl avatar in a digital space. We then jump over to other people doing the same outdoors, in marketplaces, on foot bridges, and more.
You won’t actually transform in the real world as they do in the advert, but it later shows that everything they did with the mocap on was recorded in a digital space, meaning you can film anime movements using your own body. You could even possibly attach them to your cat and end up with a twisted, inhumane cat-person. However, the “expressions and hand movements [were] edited using 3DCG software”, so the “images [are] for illustration purposes only.”
You can export the animations created to Unity and MotionBuilder, as well as games like VRChat, taking it a step further than the otherwise limited head-and-hand-tracking we’re currently used to.
The idea is to develop “compact and simple, mobile motion capture”, which could be a huge hook for VTubers wanting easier full-body motion capture. It goes on sale in Japan in January 2023, with no current dates for a Western release.
