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ttp://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.index //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// .bvh
What is .bvh: short history of the file format
document style: communication between machines and humans
file format as a standard, what about standards

IERARCHY ext: ahmed, verticality arents and children: hierarchies, loops, linearity situation, situatedness


OFFSET
No ground
datapoints, body is at 0, no ground
text: parisi, uncomputable
text: snelting, rocha: worldsettings for beginners


CHANNELS
motioncapture: markerless vs. eh ... markerful?
rotation, pavel. rotation information to movement (Euler)


MOTION
story of vectorial vs discrete
text: portanova, discretion
























3 questions/groups

What are the potentialities opened up when thinking movement into computation? MOVEMENT
Parisi + Portanova

What bodies could/does this file format create? W hat kind of (thoughts about) bodies create this file format? BODY
Parisi + Ahmed

Does location work at all, if there is no ground? Is displacement a movement, if there is no place? How do surfaces behave around this no-land's man, and what forces affect them? SPACE
Parisi + Rocha, Snelting :-)




05/05

TODO

FS 
cards red and white
finish edit Cunningham

AZ
look for hand patent
look for eshkol copyright statement + notation
learns movements of eshkol choreography

Set-up beforehand:
Leftleg complete on the floor
projection = stickfigure ?
screen on the floor loops motion

white things are already on floor (6 joints)
indentation, motion, frames, frame times, patents, data points, red things = stack

----
AZ 
introduction
contextualisation: motion capture, why this fileformat

because we dared to look --
discoveries, share those

FS Two lines about history -- Cannot open the file ... on-screen: show database, download file, close computer/screen off -- link to document in your hands and on the floor.
----
FS hierarchy, document, humans and machines
FS starts right leg WHITE (3 joints)
AZ hierarchy in thinking bodies, data joints and body joints, the metaphorical terminology and hierarchical logic of the file and the body.
----
AZ puts right leg RED
FS datapoints, referentiality
FS spine WHITE (4 joints)
AZ going back to hip (at the top), cultural importance, the discovery of the hip by eshkol. do bodies escape computation or does computation create bodies?
FS puts patent/license Eshkol document
---
AZ spine RED
AZ (has moved to the spine) an opposit example of how eshkol's movement restricts the body. 
AZ starts right arm WHITE (6 joints)
FS rotation, three types of movement
FS puts right arm RED
--
AZ reads cunningham edit and shows movements
FS unrolls patent documents: Buckminster fuller and xxxx
AZ this body now/sofar has 2 legs, 1 spine and 1 arm and a hand and no fingers
[leave some space]
FS puts MOTION, frames, frame time WHITE
FS explains: this body does not move yet, status of the file: ready to be moved transition to ending . 
AZ put all a4s with data
FS story of vectorial vs discrete, ref. portanova maybe
FS joins AZ until DONE







04/05

TO-DO in Stuttgart

- check with Phil and/or Sina: continuous/vector or discontinous
- check kinect setup etc.

reading the file

WHY
contextualisation: motion capture, why this fileformat

b e cause we dared to look --
discoveries, share those

---  the website, open file, plus story: how to open the file

--- close screen, to the files on the table (with notes?) .

explain hierarchy

how to read it from file. -- it feels a bit like french

let the body lead the reading?
becoming confident to speak about things

Now back to our file: ROOT: hip and cultural importance
Now back to our file: HIERARCHY: how the body can be seen through the structure of the document (conventional representation of a body, show how this influences movement (eshkol), tell about how eshkol also contributed to thinking of body differently)
Position
Rotation
OFFSET
Now back to our file: Indentation (definition of the contract) readability for humans and machines
Now back to our file: JOINT and rigid bodies (joints are here to describe connections and not a body, but somehow they are forced o nto each other)
Now back to our file: Frames vs vectorial, continuity vs discrete, vision vs. math
Frame time
MOTION
Now back to our file: CHANNELS degrees of freedom
Now back to our file: JOINT and End Site organisation of this body, what parts; head end (root start)
Now back to our file: End Site context, no world, no relations, no dependencies outside the document/frame





local vs global context



Representing a body



Position, rotation 1: world of the foot (
Position, rotation 3: degrees of freedom





MAYBE
Position, rotation 2: euler angles (maybe?)
    
    
What can we see from the file

Where does this file sit/exist/come from

Hierarchy/notation



End

you need to look, it creates world, you create world





03/03 Adva, Femke

Reading 'Orientational metaphors; (Lakoff + Johnson). Referential text in dance practice for thinking on language vs body. Possibly outdated (1997), but interesting entry to reflect on metaphors, notation, programming and meaning -- how we oscillate between different modes of understanding these texts, ie bvh. (learning the language of a practice through another language (ballet in hebrew with french terminology ; thinking through the dyslexic typographer)

A connection to Hito Steyrl ('falling') and Sarah Ahmed? queer phenomenology orentation objects others. (last chapter on disorentation)

Kinect troubles with horizontal posture, different systems of motion capture and consequences for understandings of movement/body/segments

Lakoff + Johnson: looking at metaphors as an internalised system, based on experience. The experiental basis that produces CONSCIOUS is UP vs UNCONSCIOUS is DOWN is different from the one that produces MORE IS UP vs LESS IS DOWN (first set: base on sleeping/awake bodies, second set: stacking in a world with gravity).

While the experiential basis might be different, according to Lakoff + Johnson, they observe how metaphors start to connect and produce 'coherence': HIGH STATUS is UP connects to HAPPY is UP. It is hard to pull those apart, to change orientation (a small person laying 'down' on the ground, how can we think of him/her as being 'high' status?)

We realise how much the .bvh (and programming languages, markup) makes use of such engrained metaphorical systems, or 'common sense' and that we are looking for thinkers that help us go beyond. This is where Barad gets interesting again. The 'world of the foot' (the fact that up nor down is fixed in 3D) is inspiring, and helps us to try and rethink these spatial metaphors.

Varela: autopoiesis, the mind is everywhere. The brain has a special place, but is not on top of thinking.

Continuing Barad: scale (touching electrons, not 'a body' or 'object'). Remembering/reminding that the body is not whole, and how this changes many other things. The idea of thinking the body as whole is part of a system of 'meaning', not easy to undo.
also - what we consider to be one body is actually a colony of many different interrelated living and non living entities.

"Perhaps it takes facing the inhuman within us before com-passion -- suffering together with, participating with, feeling with, being moved by -- can be lived. How would we feel if it is by way of the inhuman that we come to feel, to care, to respond"

Barad: inside-outside. 3D imagery, usually a lot of work done to confirm conventional notions of bodies as grounded, vertical, enclosed, whole. Once you let go of that work (starts to appears through glitch), images might appear of quite different bodily presence, orientations, relations between inside and outside.

it might mean to keep the tools visible as a way to understand/remember the context, the protocols that are applied on the imagery that is produced.
it might mean to let go of trying to construct humanoids. Details, fragments?

spacetimemattering

29/2 Adva, Femke, Francois

mocap is sampled, slices of time. unless flexometers. bvh = camera output = sampled

'as soon as you go to the computer it is numbers'

Let’s conclude this chapter with an image of Cunningham-in-motion that exemplifies this global rootlessness. At the Museum of Modern Art in 1971, Cunningham danced his eccentric solo “Loops” in front of one of Jasper Johns’s “Map” paintings, based on Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Airocean Projection of the Globe. Fuller divided the surface of the earth into 20 equilateral spherical triangles in order to produce the most “objective” least distorted, two-dimensional projection of the globe to date. And in much the same way that Fuller and Johns flatten out the earth with scrupulous objectivity, Cunningham danced in a rootless way that demonstrated no special preference for any one spot.

***
Laban -> https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/67/e2/70/67e270263d772053d80ae437a8db4a8b.jpg
***

28/2 Adva, Femke Jara

Explaining 'plans' for Stuttgart: To stick with the fileformat. To do a collective reading of it. Deviate to other references, ideas:

For Adva, the main thing -- why do we do it? 
what is it all for?
movement, motion capture <-- focus on movement
movement exists in computation, not just in the physical space (body)
movement as a way to question relationship between virtual/physical/computational spaces
to reflect on digital through movement. 


1item: right hanf method -> determines orientation: backwards and forwarding

determins computatioal space in movement

mevement happens around the body if it is chosen as the reference

[time + space dimension s ]xyz axis

[what are the minimal units of such novement?]

what makes sense and what not
from the particular to the collective

units on the file:
skeleton: segmentation
disection into time: observation of points in space

when this set of data gets processed by the computer, the atoms are put in motion // there is an inbetween?

[this reminds me of barad: on touching -> http://differences.dukejournals.org/content/23/3/206.abstract ]

text of xxxnova: rethink binary not as / but 0 and 1 as to avoid and to maintain

[and this connects with the BUT]

Parisi's text -- the incomputable and instrumental possibility

develop a mode of thinking through instrumentality // materiality from within the instrument

*

work with francois: snapshots into vectoral (not even visually rendered) movement: re-constructung path

From within the artefact, to think from within the artefact, to change scale as a possibility

not limit to individual, does not ask for the will of the movement
minds are too often connected with "the" human ...

micro choreograph ies of matter in an artefactual time-space, scaling up and down


File formate specification


28/2 Adva, Femke (Michael), WTC25

to think dance, not just to do dance -- politics

http://www.mercecunningham.org/index.cfm/choreography/dancedetail/params/work_ID/183/
Loops was performed in front of Jasper Johns' "Map (Based on Buckminster  Fuller's "Dymaxion Airocean World)."


Locations for 'invisible'/intangible movements (imperceptible to the human body?), and where they could take place:

MM: "don't move your fingers, the body is actually like a reference system"

Letting new concepts, ideas coming out of the tech/tools itself without claims on disciplinary knowledge (tech). Movement is in so many places, but thinking movement is a way of practicing the proposition. 

From plausible to possible.

When we say movement, we don't mean represention of movement


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-hand_rule
abstraction and the body


http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/clean-digital-dancing
https://research.cs.wisc.edu/graphics/Courses/cs-838-1999/Jeff/BVH.html

27/2 Adva, Femke, WTC25

Two philosophical offerings of potential: The incomputabl and instrumental possibility (Parisi, Majaca) and Stamatia Portanova, Moving without a body.
Is it 'just' philosophy? Limitations of the tool, notion of endlessness.

It is exciting (as an idea) but what does it change in the way we move, relate?

microproduction, between the dots

to take the invitation to think about the creative potential of the 'uncomputable', and think together where it is actualised
From which door we enter ...

Lilith -- fantasize other examples, examples of our own?

Imagine what it would mean, what consequences. Remember the hip.
Relating to the world differently, 

an archive of movements
re-using movements -- from choreography to military to ...
movements stored or externalised, movement locked outside ... what does it mean. Potential but also closing, movement that is abstract becomes material through the digital -- that is scary. Categorising movement?
Potential vs confinement

representing movement -- experiencing bodies
a real movement -- what is that.
different spaces, different movements

----

"the world of"
the context -- what does it do to the way we think.

opticalisation of movement 
Motion capture: the problematics of understanding/experiencing movement through the visual (capture + rendering)


M O T I O N  C A P T U R E

gait [g?t]: the manner or style of walking.
gait analysis evaluation of the manner  or  style  of  walking,  usually  done  by  observing  the  individual  walking  naturally  in  a  straight  line.  The  normal  forward  step  consists  of  two  phases:  the stance phase, during  which  one  leg  and  foot  are  bearing  most  or  all  of  the  body  weight,  and  the swing phase, during  which  the  foot  is  not  touching  the  walking  surface  and  the  body  weight  is  borne  by  the  other  leg  and  foot.  In  a  complete  two-step  cycle  both  feet  are  in  contact  with  the  floor  at  the  same  time  for  about  25  per  cent  of  the  time.  This  part  of  the  cycle  is  called  the double-support phase.
http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/gait

The cultural condition of the hip
A culturally respected articulation
the energy of life -- tantra
where you produce life

Dance: "keeping the center"

time it was invented: from ballet to be on the floor, floor as a partner
first: hip part of the torso. Through the dance notation, you need to separate bodyparts. If you write the hip, it starts to be possible to move it.
revolution of the hip

why biological habits are reproduced in the file format?

cascade
coil/spiral
rhizome

this results in the representation of movement

fileformat as a hypothesis

assumption: movement is self-generated

questions:
- what about movement from the outside (gravity? outside forces?)
- 










--------

Irina Kaldrack https://vimeo.com/77526442

What does this to movement?

-----
Researching connection notation, storage files/data capture/.bvh. Eshkol notation.
http://snelting.domainepublic.net/tools/tying-the-story-to-data
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eshkol-Wachman_movement_notation
Invite someone to teach us Eshkol?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VASzx30xKqo
No relation to the space, no dependency on the space; the body on an invisible grid. Decontextualisation?

-----
Rotography https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/US_patent_1242674_figure_3.png
http://www.pnas.org/content/101/32/11909.full
photographic to graphic

-----
In verse kinematics, cancelling /compensating motions (ref: medical technology "correcting" for movement)
Kinnect has a database of pre-existing movements
production and reproduction
gait
drones
http://www.learnaboutrobots.com/inverseKinematics.htm
afference, efference, reafference, exafference

-----
"uncanny valley"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

----
Mathematical movement/hidden movement: Gimbal lock, Euler angle, degrees-of-freedom (channel), quaternxxxx (rotation in 4 dimensions)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm8tzzfy1Uw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJOX8DWLzGc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6lf8t9WXn8 (euler)
[ Popping and locking, breakdance, ... ]
+Vogue! : staticism translated to movement: transmedia // dance battles based on queer situated categories https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hedJer7I1vI

----
Point systems, bodies as moving points, fractured bodies (?)
-> from points to vectors; from cinematic to computational movement
3 layers of movement, generating movement, where is movement, chronology (process of capture to vectorial to rendered movement)

----
muscles moving the skeleton and vice versa. Order of movement, what moves what. (hierarchy) Release technique?

----
"the world of the foot"
eshkol is also a kind of the world of the foot (the body is seperated from its context)
situated/decontextualised movement. The movement orients the world

----
rhizome vs treestructure, body as linear hierarchy

----
body as a container, as a surface -> movement as ... . Metaphors we live by / George Lakof

----
Researching domains of application, military vs medical vs dance vs ...

Photography, framing, capture (performing hysteria); Muybridge, Marey

"to touch the inner part of the avatar"
androgynous? what touches what?
http://tanukis.frankiezafe.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

Lisa Nelson project Francois and Louise

---------------
"the world of the foot"
Trying out Eshkol notation

---------------------------------
4/11
how do you move with the world?
what moves against the world?
how does the world move with you?
how do you describe the world?
how do you make the world move?

Adva: it is disturbing how esthetic movements and weapons are thought through the same way of describing world.
What movement do we have in common?

think of the biovision file format as a narrative thread, a "text"

... produce, develop a series of "modules" that are calleable, available when "reading" the text, a collection of movements
(this is still/excitedly pedagogical; it is a toolkit so that is inspiring initself but it is not yet another way to move)

- to capture a toolkit of movement (.bvh, map to avatar)
- If we would understand computational movement, we would be able to think of physical movement differently.
- The story of the discovery of the hip (ref. Sofia)
- The principle of the Gimbal lock
- The principle of the Euler angle: "How did you get there?"
- Multiplicity vs. dissection -- multiplication (ie production) of mathematical movements in order to read physical movement/generate computational movement
- Zeno and the doctor
- Discussion between Seda and Antoinette: Antoinette - life escapes computing. Seda: computing makes world. Parisi meets Octavia Butler meets Rouvroy
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/77/76322/the-incomputable-and-instrumental-possibility/
- What do we say when we say movement
- Notating movement (tediousness) 
- Hysterical arc
- devices: rotograph, gimbal, durer 'window', xxxx
- language, metaphors of thinking through the 'body' = 'movement'
- Reverse kinematics, cancelling motions (ref: medical technology "correcting" for movement)
- "uncanny valley"
- "degrees of freedom"
- Popping and locking, breakdance + systems, bodies as moving points, fractured bodies
- "the world of the foot"
- domains of application, military vs medical vs dance vs ... drone
- where does movement happen -- movement mind, disembodied movement, ... moving at the other side of the world
- situation/location taken out of movement

//////////////////////////////////////
https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/gimbals.html

/////////////////////////////////////

CAPTURE

"Motion capture (Mo-cap for short) is the process of recording the movement of objects or people. It is used in military, entertainment, sports, medical applications, and for validation of computer vision[2] and robotics. In filmmaking and video game development, it refers to recording actions of human actors, and using that information to animate digital character models in 2D or 3D computer animation.[3][4][5] When it includes face and fingers or captures subtle expressions, it is often referred to as performance capture.[6] In many fields, motion capture is sometimes called motion tracking, but in filmmaking and games, motion tracking usually refers more to match moving." (WP)

Fileformats
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motion_and_gesture_file_formats
Relations between practices, devices and formats
Different expectations of what is being captured.

Ways to capture motion:

Timeline: http://motioncapturesociety.com/resources/industry-history
Early history: https://www.siggraph.org/education/materials/HyperGraph/animation/character_animation/motion_capture/history1.htm

Instructionism / http://www.inflexions.org/tangents/sydney/generativethought.html / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqKRLiVJsEQ / http://www.inflexions.org/tangents/sydney/generative.pdf  

Databases, files
Find out about animation databases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animation_database

(all more or less 10 years old?)


Softwares


http://www.academia.edu/15291541/Creating_a_Library_of_Gestures_with_Variants

"What  we obtain from a motion capture session is a set of unconnected dots that portray an individual’s motion sequence. It is at this point that the first level of interpretation begins, an important aspect of which is detection of manipulative intent. The collection of dots, known, as cloud points must be identified, and in most situations will indicate the joint centers of an individual body." (Lisa Naugle, Reflections on Dancing with William Forsythe, 2000)

"Markerless Motion Capture" http://www.organicmotion.com/markerless-mocap-data/hnology
fps? The camera is in there ...

Different techniques we could try, look into (F/LOSS?)

Need to talk ot Francois Z ...


Non-free


Suits
http://diyourself.ru/living/puppeteer-motion-capture-costume-do-it-yourself.html

ALIGNMENT

"contemporary computational processing is moving from an automatic recognition of data only to also encompassing a certain degree of attentive recognition, as neural networks automatically and attentive transform data to fit the model they operate by. Always  processing and always calculating probabilities this new form of governance is truly modulatory and preemptive in its algorithmic  reproduction of the same patterns in new data." https://machineresearch.wordpress.com/2016/09/26/soren-rasmussen/

"default skeleton" https://github.com/davidflam/OpenMoCap/blob/master/OpenMoCap/Resources/skeleton/default.bvh

"match movement"

"face recognition"

Description and Recognition of Curved Objects http://sicv.activearchives.org/logbook/piece-correspondences/

Automatic transcription: Gentle
gentle alignment (translation, expectation: what to listen for?) https://lowerquality.com/gentle/

"Dense capture"

Expectation, prediction - "what does it want"


Same movement, different bodies

SYSTEMS + VOCABULARIES (NOTATION)

What regime/perspective to put on the body, what counts as a body
.bvh = bipeds , ie only moving targets with two legs.

Andrés Fernández http://www.debajodelsombrero.org/nuevaweb/andres.html
Anatomy

Copyright
C apturing gestures - what about copyright ?
Kobe Matthys - Agency?
Smartphone moves - Karlsruhe
julien previeux - 'what shall we do next', patented gestures

----
05/10/2016 Jara + Femke

completedness of the body: idea of an individual (a moving thing with two legs)
bidirectionality in some cases:
translation is always based (?) on datapoints, mapped to a "skeleton"

from continuous to discrete to "suggested continuity"

Tirso said that there are 2 ways of 3D modelling: departing from inner structure (skeleton), and pushing-pulling the mesh, actually like clay does
ah yes. But here, in this case it is not so much about modelling volume, but translating movement from physical to computational space.

buen in the case of translating movement to a pre-existing virtual body... would it work, the motion capture file, in a body that has been modelled without skeleton?
it seems not ... so the movement is always calculated according to a trajectory of points. But we could look for ways those points can be mapped on a virtual volume without skeleton, so far i haven't seen it. On the other hand, if you move a box in space ...

So how do non-rigid objects move in virtual space, moving things that have "joints" (?) 
It seems the skeleton defines how the different elements move together, how they influence each other
but what about this: http://cloud.constantvzw.org/index.php/s/LxYYiqcbojNoNtF

Tirso experiment: Affecting a trajectory real-time ... (with DAZ http://www.daz3d.com )
The movement can be from inside or outside "there is no inner structure" -> http://cloud.constantvzw.org/index.php/f/21103
Liquidness, collapse ... fascia & connective tissue
Rigidness to the volume -- responding to certain inputs, but not to others. No "bounce", "gravity"

So how is the movement get stored, can this movement be exported, can the mesh pull-push a body elsewhere?

"i add this video, a layer i still could not craft, so by now it is just a projected image [nice!] that comes from fragmented bodies. I call it "chicharrones 3d" (chicharrones= http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JvWuR3fI5wY/UJYzRuUPDxI/AAAAAAAAB9U/ej1YspTj_gU/s1600/DSC_1359.JPG) , the trajectories of these pieces of flesh (edible?) can be manipulated realtime while they connect with other bodies/pieces in a multispace ."

what type of connections, what does that mean when they are other than mimicking "skeleton" or other pseudo naturalist constructs?

motion capture of multiple bodies and objects
multiple motion captions projected on a "singular" computational object

agnosis -- shapes that cannot be processed

Making a sandwich:
http://cloud.constantvzw.org/index.php/s/dY5xu4Fmzw5nIGD

----------
08/10/2015 Adva + Femke

Reading bvh files
http://research.cs.wisc.edu/graphics/Courses/cs-838-1999/Jeff/BVH.html

Various skeleton skeleton definitions possible; root is always hip; set-up hierarchical (XML)
Body set-up: 
    Root [A] joins to three child segments: [B1], [B2] and [B3]. [B3] joins two sub-child segments, [C1] and [C2].

Points on the body: accupuncture (what other segmented body systems can we think of?)

What about commercial set-ups? (understanding three cultures producing motion capture files: university labs, indie gaming/home studios, hollywood production)

Difference between modelling motion (= drawing, animation) and capturing (discrete, scanning, resolution/fps)

The position of rigid bodies in space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigid_body_dynamics#/media/File:Rigid_bodies.jpg

"The dynamics of a rigid body system is described by the laws of kinematics and by the application of Newton's second law (kinetics) or their derivative form Lagrangian mechanics. The solution of these equations of motion provides a description of the  position, the motion and the acceleration of the individual components  of the system and overall the system itself, as a function of time. The formulation and solution of rigid body dynamics is an important tool in the computer simulation of mechanical systems."

Re-reading Stamatia Portanova

Understanding "mathematical movement", from x-y-z coordinates to Eulen angle via The Matrix

Merce Cunningham BIPED http://www.mercecunningham.org/index.cfm/choreography/dancedetail/params/work_ID/165/
Golan Levin on Cunningham http://www.flong.com/projects/merce/
Motion capture:
http://openendedgroup.com/artworks/hds_process.html
http://openendedgroup.com/index.php/artworks/loops-2001-present/open-acess-data/ :-/


.bvh acts as a boundary object between practices and bodies

"Biped uses rotational data stored in the BVH format to pose a Biped  character on a frame-by-frame basis and to move it forward in time.  During import, XYZ Euler joint rotations stored in the BVH file are used  to derive Quaternion bone rotation data for the biped at each frame."

"The BVA format is an ASCII file that contains no skeleton hierarchy but only the motion data with a fixed order of transformation. The BVH format is a binary file that contains both a skeleton and motion capture data and allows each segment of a skeleton to have a specified order of transformation. A drawback of the BVH format is that it lacks a full definition of the initial pose. Another drawback is that the format has only translational offsets of children segments from their parents. No rotational offset can be defined. Moreover, the BVH format is often implemented differently in different applications, that is, one BVH format that works well in one application may not be interpreted in another. All the same the format is very flexible and it is relatively easy to edit BVH files."

"In the early 1990s, a few companies started offering motion capture services to other production companies. The early players were Biovision in San Francisco and TSi in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The systems used were optical and the software to solve the motion data was all proprietary, because the few companies that sold optical motion capture equipment didn’t have biomechanical solvers that could deliver data useable for animation to any of the current 3D animation software programs. Entertainment was a brand new market for them as they have been servicing mostly the Life Sciences sector at that time, so they looked at the service bureaus to help them access the market."

"Biovision, a company that used to operate three sports analysis studios across the country, claimed to have helped professional golfer John Daly to find a problem related to opposite movements of his hips and shoulders that happened for one-tenth of a second during his swing. Tiger Woods has done his share of motion-captured golfing for all his PGA video games. His swing has been analyzed and broken down to the smallest component in order to teach others what a perfect swing must look like."
Understanding Motion Capture for Computer Animation, Albert Menache (2010)

http://excelsior.biosci.ohio-state.edu/~carlson/history/

http://www.btsbioengineering.com/products/kinematics/ -- medical company that developed early motion capture

http://www.motionrealityincorporated.com/ military use
"Motion Reality’s VIRTSIM™ system was first  developed for military use during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In  2012, Motion Reality began a heavy push to sell in the military and law  enforcement markets. VIRTSIM™ is an integrated system including  full-body sensor kits for participants, head-mounted displays,  instrumented replica weapons, intelligent cameras, man-wearable  computers, muscle stimulation equipment, and infrastructure including  rack servers,and a sophisticated software suite. Although VIRTSIM™ ships  with a large number of premade scenarios with integrated in-game AI  characters, military and law enforcement groups can also create their  own virtual worlds and customize their training scenarios with minimal  technical expertise using Motion Reality’s software."

Motion planning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_planning ("inverse kinematics")

retargeting

outsourcing http://www.pentamedia.in/training/


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*Reading Room: The BioVision Hierarchy file format*

This edition of Reading Room will be dedicated to a collaborative dissection of the BioVision Hierarchy file format. BioVision Hierarchy (.bvh) is an ASCII file format used to import data from various motion capture systems into 3D-animation software. It was developed in the mid-nineties and remains one of the most commonly used file-formats for transposing movement captured in physical space, to a computational environment. Around this relatively legible format, a rich ecology of software tools developed. The file-format functions as a boundary object between practices and bodies, as it is used by animators, game developers, interface researchers, medical professionals, dance-historians, sports-analysts and engineers. Together we will analyse the .bvh specifications and samples of the file format in order to understand what imaginaries of the body are encoded into it, what a bipedal skeleton hierarchy consists of, and how rotational data for rigid bodies might constitute a movement in itself. 

This dissection of the .bvh file format is developed with Adva Zakai in the context of Possible Bodies, a collaborative research initiated by Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting on the very concrete and at the same time complex and fictional entities that "bodies" are, and the matter-cultural conditions of possibility that render them present. Adva Zakai is a choreographer, performer and curator who explores how body and language are perceived through each other.
http://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/

Femke Snelting develops projects at the intersection of design, feminism and Free Software. She is member of Constant, a non-profit, artist-run association for art and media based in Brussels. She co-initiated the design/research team OSP and the Libre Graphics Research Unit to investigate how digital tools and creative practice might co-construct each other. With delegates Jara Rocha, Seda Guerses and Miriyam Aouragh she takes part in the Darmstadt Delegation, assigned to explore techno-political and socio-emotional relationships between activist and technological practice. She was an Art, Science and Business fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude and currently teaches at a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies, Brussels) and Piet Zwart Institute (Media Design: experimental publishing, Rotterdam).

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http://www.tinkering.net/animation/
http://www2.biusante.parisdescartes.fr