We’re all familiar with wildly waving your arms in front of a Kinect to control an on-screen avatar, but the special hardware required ultimately limits the reach of this technology. But webcams are now built into nearly every laptop and mobile device on the market. What if you could wave your arms in front of your iPad to play your favorite motion control games?
Enter Extreme Motion. Using any 2D camera and some fancy computer vision algorithms, this app can track your body and limb positions in three dimensions and recognize pre-defined poses. Just calibrate the system with the standard “field goal” pose and from there it can tell when your body moves, rotates, and gets closer or farther away. Another benefit of this technology over infrared is it can be used outside where infrared cameras get drowned out in sunlight. So if you’ve ever wanted to play a motion control game in your backyard, let the mysterious flailing begin (as if your neighbors didn’t think you were strange enough already).
This software allows developers to create motion gaming for Windows laptops as well as iOS devices and supports Unity 3D integration.
Extreme Motion is still in development, but you can apply for early access to their SDK here.
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