World renowned motion capture specialists OptiTrack were at GDC this year demonstrating their mo-cap systems integrated with VR simulations. They chose to highlight their wide-area, camera based optical tracking solution using a basketball demo which let players handle, bounce and dribble a real life ball with complete accuracy whilst immersed in VR. Road to VR‘s Ben Lang went hands on with the system.

The largest motion capture technology provider in the world, chances are you’ve probably seen or played something that was captured using OptiTrack technology. Their systems are used across various verticals from film and television to biochemistry. At GDC this year however, OptiTrack wanted to show their tracking prowess applied to yet another field, wide-area interactive immersive experiences – tracking multiple players in large room-scale spaces.

OptiTrack attended GDC this year to highlight their wide-area motion capture solution and how it can be integrated into virtual reality experiences, specifically how precise that tracking is, even when applied to fast-moving, real-world objects like a basketball.

The OptiTrack team’s setup utilised a series of 240Hz mo-cap cameras, gear that would set you back some $40,000. They placed dot tracking markers on a basketball and used the information captured by the cameras to render a virtual ball’s position and rotation in 3D virtual space. The tracking data is handled by a custom Unreal Engine 4 plugin which handled rendering the virtual world, with the tracking pipeline adding no more than 8ms.

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