About Us
The Free Motion Capture Project (FreeMoCap) aims to provide research-grade markerless motion capture software to everyone for free.
We're building a user-friendly framework that connects an array of bleeding edge open-source tools from the computer vision and machine learning communities to accurately record full-body 3D movement of humans, animals, robots, and other objects.
We want to make the newly emerging mind-boggling, future-shaping technologies that drive FreeMoCap's core functionality accessible to communities of people who stand to benefit from them.
We follow a “Universal Design” development philosophy, with the goal of creating a system that serves the needs of a professional research scientist while remaining intuitive to a 13-year-old with no technical training and no outside assistance.
A high-quality, minimal-cost motion capture system would be a transformative tool for a wide range of communities - including 3d animators, game designers, athletes, coaches, performers, scientists, engineers, clinicians, and doctors. We hope to create a system that brings new technological capacity to these groups while also building bridges between them.
This project is managed by the FreeMoCap Foundation
Software Overview
FreeMoCap (free motion capture) is a free open source markerless motion capture system designed to provide research-quality motion capture data using free software and generic, minimal-cost webcams. The data it provides can be useful for any project that would benefit from high quality 3d measurments of human movement, including scientific research, 3D animation, sports biomechanics, and more.
Features and Capabilities
FreeMoCap features a complete GUI-based interface that can create high-quality kinematic data from single cameras, multiple cameras, or imported videos. It also produces data outputs in the form of numpy arrays, CSVs, a Blender output scene, and a preloaded Jupyter notebook that is set up for analyzing the data that was just produced. This is especially useful for classroom settings or immediate opportunities for exploratory data analysis the moment the data is done processing. The software is designed to work with minimal-cost, low-quality USB webcams, as well as asynchronous recording methods such as GoPros. Support for research-grade cameras like FLIR or IP cameras like White Matter is planned.
Community Involvement and Support
FreeMoCap has a vibrant and growing community of users and developers, including research and clinical scientists, 3D animators, video game designers, and open-source software developers. Most of the community is centered around a Discord server.
Here, people can ask questions and receive support from the developers and other members of the community. Feature requests and bug reports should be submitted to the GitHub issues space.