Full Immersion Entertainment
Brad Friedman

Kinearx is a system of software for end to end motion capture.  It starts at the mocap hardware and goes all the way through animation editing in typical 3d animation software packages.

Kinearx is in development and modular.

Some modules are already available while others are in progress.

Some modules are open source, while others are commercial in nature.

Some modules are feature complete while others are in alpha or beta stages.

Below, you will find an up to date listing of the modules and links to relevant information about each.

Kinearx2DOTServer

Project page including download

Current license: Open source LGPL v3.

This is a Windows application that controls NaturalPoint optitrack cameras and acts as a server for streaming their 2d tracking data over standard IP networks.

It works over both wired and wireless networks.

It has a very simple, platform independent, binary stream protocol. It effectively jailbreaks the rest of the process from the Windows environment.

Multiple cameras on separate computers will sync their frame IDs as long as a sync cable is looped through all the cameras. In this manner, you can get around the 3m cable length limitation of USB2.0.  You can set up islands of cameras, clustered around as many PCs as required, to cover a volume. Utilized correctly, this blows away most limitations as to the number of cameras in a mocap volume.  This solution scales linearly.

Python 2D Client Example

Project page including source

Current license: Open source BSD.  Usable by commercial projects.

This free example script, written in Python, runs in windows, linux and OSX.

It shows exactly how to acquire and intrepret the binary stream provided by the Kinearx2DOTServer and provides a jumping off point for programmers using any language.  Its easily portable.

Kinearx Blockhouse

Current license: Closed source.

Blockhouse is the very simple, very reliable tool for recording your 2d mocap data.  It logs into 2d servers and robustly synchronizes and records their data to timestamped files. In its design, blockhouse assumes possible failure of all components, and does everything possible to safeguard your data against failures and loss.

Multiple Blockhouses can record the same data simultaneously and independently.  This provides even more redundancy and protection.

You can leave a blockhouse recording all day, or all week, while using realtime tools in parallel.

Lense Calibrator

Current license: Closed source.

In development: the kinearx lense calibration tool finds the lense distortion of an individual camera by optimizing parameters of a radial distortion model.  It can do this with a single camera.  Its runtime scales linearly with the number of cameras in a system.

The resultng lense model is then applied to raw mocap data later in the pipeine, to remove the innacuracy introudced by barrel and pincushion lense distortion.