Motion capture has been used by game studios and Hollywood filmmakers for years, but it hasn’t been cheap and accessible for the home market. Noitom set to change some of those rules in 2014, with a successful Kickstarter campaign for Perception Neuron, a relatively inexpensive motion capture system that has since become widely used by filmmakers, animators, game developers, athletes, researchers and medical professionals. Perception Neuron focused on tracking the body, but Noitom’s new solution is capable of tracking a lot more.
Called Project Alice, Noitom’s newest motion capture product is made with virtual reality in mind. Announced yesterday in China, the company said Project Alice is a commerical virtual reality system with HMD, inertial mocap suit, optical tracking system, motion glove and backed computer which can bring an extremely immersive virtual reality experience to the users.
Project Alice provides three different solutions at different buy in levels that could be used for in home standard PC VR, in home room scale experiences, as well as in virtual reality theme parks like The Void.
Project Alice appears to use a combination of IMU based tracking systems, like the one one in Perception Neuron, and optical based systems similar to Optitrack. Worth noting is that this system offers the ability to track just about any object, as you can see by the tracking markers on the trashcan, basketball, and yoga block on the ground. That additional flexibility opens the door for a number of possibilities for larger scale immersive experiences.
More images from Project Alice’s website:
According to Noitom the project gets its name from the Lewis Carroll classic, Alice in Wonderland, and the company hopes their users could have a magic wonderland experience with the new motion capture system.
UPDATE: A previous version of this story stated that Project Alice is a consumer product, according to Perception Neuron it is currently a B2B solution only focused on the Chinese market at this time.
Additional Reporting by Oval Po of YiVian.
