Extreme Reality's Extreme Motion uses 2D webcams for 3D motion games (hands-on)

Extreme Reality's technology revolves around gestures, and its latest effort is to bring that movement to the masses: its Extreme Motion developer kit turns just about any off-the-shelf webcam or built-in camera on common platforms, including Android, iOS and Windows, into an almost Kinect-like system capable of tracking 3D motion. Despite missing depth cameras or other additional sensors, it's theoretically quite accurate -- the software tracks joints across the body in every frame, although it's not quite so sensitive as to track fingers.

This author had the chance to make a fool of himself in front of a laptop's camera to see how well Extreme Motion works. In short, reasonably well: while it wasn't in perfect sync, it recognized with less-than-elegant moves in a Dance Central-style demo title and flagged whether a shimmy was right on target or evidence of two left feet. Of course, this experiment was conducted in a brightly-lit hotel ballroom, where body detection is ideal, so take the experiment with a grain of salt. It's still adept enough that the developers who will have access to the (currently free) toolkit can produce motion games we'd be sincerely interested in playing.

Filed under: Gaming, Software

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Source: Extreme Reality