Problem: The old method of getting realistic human movement into a computer—dress a person up in a clunky ping-pong-ball-studded suit—is out of fashion. It takes hours to calibrate the computer to recognize the markers, which can fall off as the person moves. Worse yet, if one of the markers becomes obscured by a moving body part, the computer can no longer connect the dots to create the entire stick-figure skeleton, so high-priced engineers must spend long hours redrawing a lost leg or arm.

Status: With Organic Motion’s Stage, the first-ever markerless motion-capture system, subjects step in front of the camera in their street clothes, and instantly their avatar forms onscreen. The system uses input from 10 to 14 cameras to create a 3-D cloud of data points. The computer triangulates the location of each point, and the cloud takes the shape of the person, providing designers with full-body motion and 3-D texture that flows into existing animation software for easy manipulation. “And nothing gets lost,” says developer and CEO Andrew Tschesnok. “We still know where the elbow and arm are if the person’s hand goes behind something.”

What’s next: As developers adopt the tech, Stage has the potential to make entire games more realistic. With traditional motion capture, you might have the time and money only to record the ball-handling skills of a couple star players and then translate their attributes to other players. “Now,” Tschesnok says, “you could conceivably record every player in the league.” When systems like Stage can capture an entire field’s worth of movement, videogame action will be indistinguishable from the real thing.—B.C.

Image: Old motion-capture systems involved special clothing. The Stage system grabs info without a costume change.