I just found out today about a new company offering their solution to a full body MOCAP suit. Introducing the new Enflux Full Body MOCAP suit. This suit is interesting because unlike the Perception Neuron with nodes you attach to your body, the Enflux suit has nodes embedded within the fabric of the suit. How the suit deals with the offset in armature scale is an unknown. Hopefully they have solved that small issue.
The suit is driven by 10 IMU sensors; five located in the pants and five located in the shirt. Evidently the electronics are easily removed in order to facilitate easy washing of the suit. Each node is rated to plus or minus 2 degrees in roll, pitch and yaw. Their are currently making developers’ suits available to the public for $500. There is also a $100 headband that can be used for head tracking. Currently the technology is available for Blender and Unity. There is no documentation discussing availability for UE4. Overall this looks like a cost effective alternative to the Perception Neuron Suit that can be easily applied and removed, via the suit, and is hygienic, easy to wash.
Similar to the Perception Neuron, this could be used as a poor man’s MOCAP solution. At $500 less than the Perception Neuron this may seem like a more cost effective solution.
Regretfully, from an iMyth perspective, I am going to take a back seat on this technology until something a little more second generation arrives. The first and foremost reason is that this is an IMU driven sensing solution. IMUs are great at measuring relative accelerations and displacements. Without a relative world space anchor they have a bad problem of “drifting” away. The drift is caused by an inherit flaw in the electronic’s calculations. As each node iterates over the solution, the amount of drift increases, somewhat randomly, over time. We found a solution to this by using an HTC Vive headset as the anchor point for all character calculations. While not perfect or optimal, it did provide a suitable solution to keep the character in the same relative space. A better solution would be to use a Steam VR tracker at the waist, at the wrists and ankles and on the head. If you are going to this extent, all the suit really offers is economic solutions for the elbows and knees. 2 degrees of float in all of the calculations seems like a heavy priced to pay. That will come across as a lot of float :(.
They offer a headband with another tracking node in it for $100. This may be great for a non-real time capture performance. However, I’m not quite sure how this would work with an HMD over the user’s head. The Enflux suit also does not provide support for articulated fingers. This is something the Perception Neuron does provide. Understandably this was a design choice in order to keep the cost of the suit down. Will there be some integration with an articulated glove in the future? We’ll just have to wait and see.
Enflux has a very reasonable entry into the Full Body MOCAP market. Being cheaper than the Perception Neuron may give them the competitive edge they need in order to stay alive. However, being dependent on a pure IMU solution leaves the door open to much better tracking technologies come with the second generation.
