Advertisement

You're blocking ads, which pay for BlenderNation. Read about other ways to support us.

Chordata Motion, the Open Source motion capture kit, will be live on Kickstarter in July with lower prices

2

Chordata.Motion writes:

We at Chordata Motion, the only Open Source motion capture kit that integrates natively with Blender, had recently announced our intentions to move to the next stage of our development process with the first production release of our system through a Kickstarter campaign. The current global COVID-19 crisis made us have to rethink our plans in order to adapt to this new scenario. After 3 months of lockdown, we can finally announce that our Kickstarter campaign is back!

We'll be live on Kickstarter on the 1st of July 2020. If you want to know the exact time of the launching and catch up one of our limited Early Bird rewards, please pre-order your kit. We'll send you an email before the launch.

We have been working hard on adapting our offer to the current global reality. We had multiple meetings during the lockdown in order to make sure we moved in an accurate direction. Our main focus was guaranteeing that you received your rewards in the first few months of 2021. We achieved this while being able to lower the costs of the kits by €100.

What follows is an overview of the changes we have applied to our original offer. Make sure to read until the end of the article so that you can review our new campaign opening date and the lower prices we have been able to offer. Do not forget to place your pre-order, as this is the only way to assure that you will be notified in advance before our campaign opens, which is how you can guarantee access to one of the limited rewards we’re offering, such as the Early Bird prices.

The sensor

Our main redesign was applied to the sensor. We had three objectives in mind: guaranteeing that our production schedule was maintained so that the delivery of the kits would not need to be pushed back further; keeping a high degree of flexibility that characterizes the Chordata motion framework, and also improving the reliability and usability of the KCeptor++, which is the name of Chordata Motion’s brand new sensor.

With these purposes in mind, we reviewed every single element in the design of our sensors and conceptualized a couple of alternatives until we reached an architecture that satisfied us. What we did was simply remove every single one of the nice-to-have elements while leaving all of the must-haves. This way, we have simplified the production process, which allows us to guarantee that we won’t need to delay the delivery of our kits.

All of this was achieved while maintaining our quality standards, thus assuring that the improvements in our sensors will be visible to the eye of our community. This way we keep all the functionalities that most of Chordata Motion’s users asked for and do not make them wait much longer in order to have them at hand.

The development process

Most of the development process remains the same. We will need to initiate the hardware engineering as soon as we finish with the crowdfunding campaign, while also finishing with the textile production process. After all this, we will also need to go through the appropriate certification process in order to make sure that we can commercialize our kits. This process will end by the beginning of next year. This ensures that our users will have the kits they acquire in their hands by March 2021.

On top of this, we will also continue developing our software components with additional financing. This campaign will help us ensure that all the requirements are met for the hardware production, but our framework’s software components will keep on being improved during the production process and after the rewards have been delivered.

Our stretched goals

For our Kickstarter campaign, we will initially aim at a total of €35,000 in funding. If we can assure more funding, we will be able to deliver additional rewards. By reaching €50,000, we will guarantee a black solder mask for the sensors, which will give them a more stylized look. If we’re able to reach €100,000, we will be able to offer two additional sensors to all of those who acquire a full-body system, which will ensure more capture points (and thus a higher degree of fidelity in your capture). With €200,000, we will be able to guarantee the development of facial motion capture software which will easily integrate with the rest of the system. All of these offer more reasons to mobilize all of those who are interested in Open Source motion capture technology, as that will ensure we can provide an even better solution.

New dates and prices

Seeing all of this, we will be able to guarantee that all of the kits will be in the hands of the users by March 2021, only one month after our originally expected date, which was February 2021. This means you will not need to wait much longer until you can start diving into the amazing world of motion capture.

Additionally, all of the optimizations we’ve applied to the sensor have allowed us to reduce the costs of the production process. Seeing this, we wanted to share this improvement with our community. We have decided to lower all of the prices of the rewards by a margin of €100, which will allow more people to access this amazing technology. The only exception will be our Motion Starter kit, the smallest one, which we can only manage to reduce by a margin of €45.

This means that you will be able to acquire a full-body motion capture kit for only €699 if you happen to catch one of our limited early-bird offers.

There is simply no other way to access a similar system for this price range, so we encourage you to place your pre-order now and guarantee access to the limited rewards (such as the early-bird price). We have worked hard in order to make this a reality. We hope you share our excitement for this next step in the world of Open Source Motion Capture.

About the Author

Chordata Motion is the first open-source motion capture system. It has native integration with Blender. Our goal is to take the world of motion capture to the universe of DIY technologies with an open software approach. With this in mind, we designed a system that is flexible enough to be adapted to the needs of any project that may require the capture of human movement in fields as vast as Game Design, Animation, Digital Arts, Electronic Music, Gait analysis or Physical Therapy.

2 Comments

    • Hi!
      Thanks for sharing this, is great to know there are more initiatives out there pushing open mocap forward!

      Our intention with the current campaign and developments is to make the mocap hardware available to those users who are not able, or not interested in assembling the hardware by themselves while keeping the flexibility and freedom an open system can provide.

Leave A Reply

To add a profile picture to your message, register your email address with Gravatar.com. To protect your email address, create an account on BlenderNation and log in when posting a message.

Advertisement

×