PERCEPTION NEURON Motion Capture System for Lightweight VR Body Suit

Virtual Reality, VR, Immersive Technology & Simulated Environment

PERCEPTION NEURON Motion Capture System for Lightweight VR Body Suit

Recently updated on December 28th, 2019 at 12:33 pm

Currently, the cost to have a complete motion capture or mocap system is quite high for the normal consumer such as students, hobbyists, freelancers and small or start-up studios. Most probably, they can’t afford it and might end up renting it for many times. Anyway, this latest Kickstarter project called “PERCEPTION NEURON” might be able to change that and give new hope to them.

Dr Tristan RL Dai the CTO of Noitom
Dr. Tristan, R.L. Dai, the CTO and Co-Founder of Noitom, talked about PERCEPTION NEURON.

PERCEPTION NEURON is actually a motion capture technology that can also be used in the virtual reality environment. Besides VR, other areas can also benefited from it such as VFX (Visual Effects), gaming, real-time stage performance, sport and medical analysis. Noitom Technology Ltd from China, the mocap company behind this system, aims to produce an adaptive and affordable mocap system for mass market by using one of the smallest IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit).

The interesting part is that the NEURON IMU is very small as shown in the picture below. It is a lot smaller than your fingernail. It is so light in weight and once put onto your body, you can still move your body freely without feeling trapped since the wires or cables also looks kinda thin. I think that will be a strong and good selling point beside the pricing.

The size of PERCEPTION NEURON
The size of PERCEPTION NEURON as compared to the hand.

The Neuron is a 9-axis IMU with on-board calculation and calibration algorithms. The details of this IMU stuff looks interesting to me and perhaps I could cover it in the future post. This IMU cannot work by its own. It needs to work together with a Hub where the Hub collects, synchronizes and transmits the data via USB port or WIFI. I think the Hub is equivalent to a mother spacehip.

The PERCEPTION NEURON system also comes together with SDK (Software Development Kit) for both Unity and Oculus Rift. It also comes together with open source demo programs. It is compatible with Windows and Mac OS X platform. Below is how the final design looks like…

Final Design of PERCEPTION NEURON
The 3D mesh illustration of PERCEPTION NEURON final design.

For virtual reality fan, the Neuron provides a seamless integration with HMD (Head Mounted Display) such as Oculus Rift. Luckily, it can work with Unity game engine which has been known to integrate very well with Oculus Rift. I think this might be the lightest VR body suit at this moment.

PERCEPTION NEURON Mocap or Motion Capture System
Virtual world interaction using PERCEPTION NEURON Mocap (Motion Capture System).

The only part that still looks troublesome is the fact that you still need to strap all those wires around your body. If you need to rush to toilet, then it seems that you still need to remove all those wires. Well, looks like we still can’t escape that part yet, rite? Below is the interesting video demo on PERCEPTION NEURON.


For your info, the great guy behind this project is Dr. Tristan, R.L. Dai who is the PERCEPTION NEURON Product Manager and also the CTO of Noitom. He got a PhD in Mechanics and Robotics and he is also a mocap and VR expert. Sounds impressive to me doc. I wish your team can achieve the $250,000 target from the Kickstarter campaign. For more info, you can visit:
1) “Project PERCEPTION NEURON: Motion Capture, VR and VFX” from Kickstarter.
2) Noitom Technology Ltd Official Website.
3) PERCEPTION, a Noitom Product Official Website.

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