Building a motion capture puppet using accelerometer's over wifi?

[mikael]

Hello!

I am a visual director (and one who has little knowledge about electrical engineering!) And I am working on a project where we want to Motion Capture a rod puppet for use in VR.

The project is called Valraven and its a bleak nordic folk tale using VR.

The idea is to build a 75 cm tall wooden dummy puppets (biped) with all limbs movable and manipulative via rods connected to the limbs in order to capture the unique way a rod puppet moves, then importing the animation data into Unity3D (game engine) to build the experience.

I have looked around for off-the-shelf systems like REMOVED (link removed) but due to this being a personal project with a very small budget (as always.. sigh!) I was wonder if its possible to build my own and trying to see how difficult vs how expensive it would be.

The ideal solution would be a a 16 (ish) 3 axis (xyz) accelerometer setup that can capture and send the data over wifi and talk to Autodesk Motion Builder (one accelerometer for each / foot/leg/upper leg/pelvis/torso/head/upper arm/lower arm/ hand)

in theory the pipeline would be

puppets -> 3 axis accelerometer -> wifi / router -> data - > Motion builder capture and animation clean up -> Export -> Unity3D import


I wonder if anyone has seen or tried to build something like this? Or could point me in the right direction.

Any help would be very much appreciated.



Cheers!

Mikael