We at Chordata Motion, the 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 live! You can order your Chordata Motion kit by selecting your reward on our Kickstarter page.
This campaign is an important step for us since it will represent an initial milestone towards becoming a sustainable project, thus guaranteeing the longevity of Chordata Motion as an Open Source project. Our intention is to provide an open, flexible, and affordable mocap system so this technology becomes truly accessible to everyone.
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.
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. You will also find a Plug & Play solution at your disposal, which reduces the set-up time so that you can start capturing as fast as possible. These two solutions will only be available on a limited number of units, so it’s important to order them right away on our Kickstarter page.
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.
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 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. Take a look at our Dev Roadmap to know what you can expect in the following months!
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 to place their order on our Kickstarter Page, 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.
There is simply no other way to access a similar system for this price range, so we encourage you to place your order now, especially if you want to have access to one of the limited rewards (such as the Plug & play kit or 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.
