2023-01-29
Post Covid, the number of athletes, coaches & volunteers engaged with sport here in Ireland has significantly declined.
AnamoLABS's interest in movement and personal mobility provided us with the opportunity to get involved. Following consultation with a number of organizations and gyms we designed and promoted a program called "Everybody Move".
This program was trialed with athletes having an intellectual disability. After three sessions we organized an 'OPEN DAY' and encouraged athletes from Special Olympics Ireland to attend. Within less than 24 hours this event was fully booked. Feedback and interviews with those who attended confirmed to us that there was an appetite for such an event.
A big thank you to Chris & Lucy Kenefick and their coaching team for giving us access to their innovative Revelate Fitness system at their OBODO Gym in Douglas, Cork.
2023-12-21
Things from Irish Christmas traditions that I sort of knew but forgot over the years.
Christmas is coming, and we recently worked again with CyberTwin on their Christmas video to celebrate Halloween at Muckross House Research Library. Our team had the pleasure of being motion captured, directed by Gerald O Brien, using The Captury Live system here at AnamoLAB - Cork.
All post processing and clean up was done using iClone 3D and rendered and assembled using Unity 3D's HDRP render pipeline.
Unfortunately anyone here resembling Santa Claus did not get to play Santy in the animation or the video capture.
May you have a Merry Christmas, a Cool Yule or a Happy Holiday
for those who celebrate
2023-12-06
With Operation Transformation due to return to RTÉ, the debate starts... Why focus on body weight? Why not have underweight contestants?
Well, weight is easy to measure. And if you can measure it, you can monitor it.
Weight is being used as a proxy for health. Admittedly they also use waist size and other measurements, but a lot of the focus is on size.
Is there something else that could be measured on the Vision Independent Productions show? Like the ability for someone to move and their flexibility? If only we could measure it accurately, he said while gesturing to the motion capture system before him.
See, it's not just for animation.
Without a motion capture system, body movement is a mix of eyeball engineering and attaching goniometers to your subject, to measure the angle of knee flexion. It's hard. Or use a marker based system, which takes ages to set-up.
Our Captury Markerless Motion Capture System can accurately map a subject's body movement, and can chart the results. And repeat the tests to track progress.
Since it's markerless, it takes a few seconds to start the tracking. This means that an Operation Transformation Leader could complete their tests in about half the time it takes to put on the markers.
This means that it is possible to quantify the progress, or regression of the mobility of the leaders through their journey on the show.
This changes the show from how the leaders look to how they move through the world. In a turn of social responsibility, it allows for body positivity by measuring the change in body physicality.
It's easy to monitor something that is easy to measure. And sometimes technology arrives that makes the hard to measure, very easy.
#OperationTransformation #BodyPositivity #BodyPhysicality #MotionCapture #MedTECH #MobilityChallenge, #BodyMovement #ProgressTracking #WellnessTechnology #QuantifiedSelf
2023-11-28
Two weeks ago, the inaugural Culture Crush event took place in Dublin, and the biggest concern at the event was "how will AI alter the creative world" or "will the machine eat our work".
The tldr; is ... it's going to be a useful tool.
The quote that sticks with me is how AI is currently changing panelist Jennifer Ely's current work. When she is doing illustration work, say for a cover, often she had to wade through publisher and artist descriptions and make multiple attempts to get their vision.
Now, they approach her with their own multiple attempts in an AI image generator such as Midjourney, and they are wrong. Bits are right, but its bits across multiple attempts. Lots of "almost right", but nothing accurate. And by saying what they want with their collage of attempts, and what isn't quite right; it means that it takes a person with talent, fewer attempts to get to the point of fine tuning.
Barry Scannell, another of the panelists and expert in Artificial Intelligence and Irish law, would point out that this is a prompt engineering problem, and so will be sorted out soon. I don't agree.
AI can do a lot. It can create a fully working iPhone game, it can make my feeble dance moves glide correctly, it can create a laughing "Mona Lisa", but it's hard to get exactly the image you have in your head, out of your head and available to the world. But it can get close ... and AI, or spicy autocorrect, is a stepping off point for creation.
This is why legal battles will continue. The Writers Guild Of America, USA's strike won its battle over keeping AI from their scripts. Its hard to get something coherent that works at a good length when starting with an incoherent concept and no life experience.
And why the Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television & Radio Artists had more difficulty. If you start with a good scan of a person, you can get them to react and move realistically enough to fool an audience for an effect. Virtual Spidermen have swung through virtual New Yorks. Its is already being introduced for ADR (additional dialog replacement) and for spoken machine translation with automated lip synching.
While it would be easy to get an actor to accept lip motion correction, or eye level changes using technology, its a different matter to legally completely replace them, which is possible (we think).
It is harder to embody a concept than it is to make a body move according to your ideas. Its easier to replicate an existing actor than it is to create one from scratch. Just ask the parents of any actors.
I've seen this while working with software design, where the step by step exactly detailed requirements and designs created after a conversation with a customer, does not meet the concepts in the customer's head. It is very hard to execute exactly their needs when the person with the idea speaks a different design language to the ones trying to implement them. This is something that takes a lot of attempts. Agile sprints exist for this reason.
Having said that, technology improves. But technology can only do what it's instructed to. Using the right words is always hard.
2023-11-23
Vindo de Portugal, tive a oportunidade de explorar a hashtag CultureCrush2023 e obter novas perspectivas.
Got useful insights from Jemma Shorten as well as Delphine Coudray , Róisín Chapman and Joseph Orr from Animation Ireland.
My current work focus is rapid prototyping using hashtag CapturyLive at AnamoLABS™ - Cork, streaming it to hashtag UnrealEngine.
Could 3D markerless hashtag MotionCapture make the difference? What do you guys think?
2023-11-23