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Chordata Motion’s Kickstarter campaign is almost funded

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Chordata.Motion writes:

As you may know by now, we at Chordata Motion, the Open Source motion capture kit, have recently released a crowdfunding campaign that will allow us to guarantee the funds needed for our first production release. After two beta testing programs (and a global pandemic), we are almost ready to release a stable version of our framework.

This has been a long ride but, after a lot of rethinking in order to adapt our product to the current global reality, we can honestly say that Chordata Motion’s Kickstarter campaign has been a success. As I am writing these lines, we have reached 90% of our initial goal and new pledges keep coming on a daily basis. With 25 days left, we have even reached the point where there are just 2 units of our Early Bird discount price (this can change by the time you read this article). If you want to get one of the remaining ones make sure to place your pledge .

Do not wait in order to back us up, as the faster we get to our initial goal, the more newcomers we will be able to attract. With this, we will also be getting closer to one of our stretched goals: if we are able to achieve 100k in funding, we will be able to add 2 sensors to each of our backers’ rewards, which means that all of them will be getting a suit with improved capturing capabilities.

Even though we have almost reached our goal, there is still a lot of work needed in order to make sure Open Source Motion Capture technology has a stable solution available on the market. In this article, we will cover the next steps that we will be taking after we have finished with this crowdfunding campaign.

Right after the campaign

Our Kickstarter campaign went through some changes, as we adapted our offer to the reality imposed by COVID-19. Seeing this new global reality, we wanted to make sure our system remained accessible to as many users as possible. You can find out all the details of our campaign described in this video.

Once our funds are gathered, we will start with the final steps of our development and production process. The first step will be giving the final touches to our textile solution and start production on these pieces. We will also go through the engineering and production of our sensors, which will take a couple of months. All of these steps will be covered by the end of 2020. We are confident we will achieve these timings because, seeing the results of our campaign, we are moving forward with the engineering process a month earlier than expected.

After this, we will be contacting each of the donors in order to gather their addresses for the shipment of the units, which will arrive to each of them by March 2021. This will mark the end of Chordata Motion’s first production release and, by the second trimester of 2021, users will be capable of ordering kits and accessories from the online store we will be preparing along this production process. Bear in mind that the prices you will be able to get then are not the same ones offered in this Kickstarter campaign, which is another reason to take advantage of our current prices by placing your pledge.

Even though our campaign will be focused on hardware production, we will also continue with the developments needed in order to keep on improving our framework’s software components.

Beyond hardware: Chordata Motion’s roadmap

We have recently released a detailed version of our roadmap. You can find it here. We will not be diving into each and every one of these developments, but we do want to highlight a few of them.

The main feature we will be working on is our python API, which will allow developers to tweak the notochord (our framework’s base block) without needing to understand its complete code base. This will expand the possibilities of what can be achieved with the system.

Another important development, and one that is already halfway through (as you can see in this video), is our Remote Console. This software component will allow the user to capture movement from any device without needing to install any third party software. The Remote Console is a progressive web app, which means that no installation is required, not even if you would like to run it natively on any smartphone, PC, Mac or GNU/Linux device.

Along with these features, we will keep on developing native integrations and plugins with various 3D and VR production platforms, such as Godot, Unreal, and Unity, among others. These will expand our user base as we improve our Blender plugin’s features.

We are here to stay

The road has proven to be cumbersome, but we are already at a point at which we can clearly say that Chordata Motion is consolidating its offer. We can not say it has been easy, but the effort has been worth it and we will not be stopping until Open Source motion capture becomes a mainstream choice in this field.

Even though we are close to achieving our goal, we still need your help in order to get there. If we are able to go beyond our initial 35k goal, there is the chance of giving all of our donors 2 additional sensors completely free of charge. This will provide all of them with a higher precision system and thus improve the quality of the captures that can be generated with it. Even though the base kits already provide awesome results, we think that this improvement will be worth the effort, so help us by making your pledge.

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.

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