What is Motion Capture Data?
Motion Capture Data — human body motion recorded as joint trajectories, used for animation and as a reference for robots that imitate people.
Optical systems — Vicon and OptiTrack are the standard names — track reflective markers with cameras at 100 to 240 Hz and resolve positions to a fraction of a millimeter inside a calibrated volume. The characteristic failure is occlusion: a marker hidden by the body drops out, and the gap is filled by software and checked by hand. Cleanup routinely takes longer than the capture session itself.
Inertial suits are the portable alternative: no cameras, capture anywhere, but position drifts over time and the suit is calibrated to the wearer at the start of each session. Both types output skeleton data, not robot commands, and the retargeting step — mapping a human skeleton onto a robot with different proportions and fewer joints — is where a shoot becomes useful or does not.
A commercial optical stage rents for hundreds of dollars an hour in the US or EU, before cleanup, which is why the target robot decides the shoot: marker set, frame rate and capture volume all follow from the machine that will imitate the motion. If the target has few joints, VR teleoperation may capture what is needed for less. Human-motion archives exist — AMASS unifies 15 capture datasets into one skeleton format — and a custom shoot for a specific robot can be commissioned to order.
Related terms
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Teleoperation
Teleoperation — a human drives the robot directly, and the robot's motion is recorded as a training demonstration.
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Humanoid Robot Data
Humanoid Robot Data — whole-body demonstrations and sensor logs from robots with legs and arms, where balance is part of every task.
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Egocentric Video Data
Egocentric Video Data — first-person footage, usually from a head-mounted camera, showing hands and objects from the wearer's own viewpoint.
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