Who would like to do that? Real cameramen, of course!

The last year has seen a few companies proposing motion-tracked devices specifically designed to act as virtual camera controllers. The idea is that a skilled cameraman can grab one of these and rapidly lay down camera moves and framing shots, instead of playing with splines and keyframes. The following product video for Intersense VCam explains how the idea works:

As you can see in the video, the device has even a camera-like body for more familiar interaction by the cameraman. Intersense has apparently two versions of the VCam system, one with 6DOF tracking, and the other limited to 3DOF. The price I found (on the EST German distributor website) for a complete VCam + tracking system setup is almost 60k euro (ouch), I guess for the 6DOF system (I could not find any price for the 3DOF version).

OptiTrack Insight VCS

A similar system is also sold by Optitrack under the Insight VCS name. This one is based on optical motion capture (instead of the inertial-ultrasonic sensors used by the VCam – again referring to the 6DOF version), uses a camera shoulder mount coupled with an LCD display, and comes for 5k dollars (but you have to add up the optical motion tracking system).

OptiTrack Insight VCS Mini

There is also a lower cost “Mini” version, without the screen, based on a XBox controller plus markers (not difficult to build on your own).

The Gamecaster GCS3 is another alternative, using just orientation tracking (you move the virtual camera by operating the device thumbsticks) and selling for almost 20k dollars.

Gamecaster gcs3

Check out the videos on the Optitrack and GameCaster web pages, they are quite interesting. It would be also interesting to know how well a skilled cameraman can operate with a 3DOF device compared to a supposedly more natural 6DOF, but I can’t find any review online.

From the software point of view, all these products provide plug-ins for animation software such as Maya or Motion Builder that, more or less, directly map operations on the motion-tracked device (movements, button presses, …) into commands to the virtual camera (move camera, zoom in, …).

Finally, if any of the people in the mentioned companies is reading this (you never know …), would be willing to lend a system for research purposes? Some of us have a couple of research ideas on what to do with these devices.