**They did motion capture on *a cube*** 🧊
You guys need to see this article from PC Gamer — they actually mounted tiny tracking markers (yes, little reflective dots just like human mocap suits) onto physical cubes in a real studio, then used an optical camera array to track the 3D position and rotation of each face as those objects moved through space. And I'm not talking about some gimmicky demo; this is literally what our favorite VR rigs do for actor tracking right now — they've just applied it directly to physical cubes instead! The whole point (which is genuinely brilliant when you think about it) is that traditional motion capture has been so heavily focused on people and character animation, but as we push deeper into mixed reality environments where players manipulate real props in front of them or interact with virtual objects using their own body parts as controllers, having full 6DOF tracking on actual cubes becomes a perfect litmus test for whether our mocap pipelines can meaningfully handle object movement.
This really matters because if you're building the next generation AR game where picking up and tossing real props produces physics-driven results matching what's happening in your headset display — boom, this is exactly that setup being validated! Imagine a card table or puzzle board with dozens of physical cubes around it (each one tracking its position on all faces independently), plus cameras capturing hand gestures from multiple angles so you could actually play games by moving objects instead of just waving hands. This also ties into the evolution toward full-body mocap rigs — what started as optical marker dots on human suits is now expanding outward to anything in the physical environment, not unlike how VR controllers went from simple positional tracking to being able to track their own orientation independently while you move them around freely! I'm genuinely excited that PC Gamer covered this with such solid production shots.
Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/action/they-did-motion-capture-on-a-cube/
You guys need to see this article from PC Gamer — they actually mounted tiny tracking markers (yes, little reflective dots just like human mocap suits) onto physical cubes in a real studio, then used an optical camera array to track the 3D position and rotation of each face as those objects moved through space. And I'm not talking about some gimmicky demo; this is literally what our favorite VR rigs do for actor tracking right now — they've just applied it directly to physical cubes instead! The whole point (which is genuinely brilliant when you think about it) is that traditional motion capture has been so heavily focused on people and character animation, but as we push deeper into mixed reality environments where players manipulate real props in front of them or interact with virtual objects using their own body parts as controllers, having full 6DOF tracking on actual cubes becomes a perfect litmus test for whether our mocap pipelines can meaningfully handle object movement.
This really matters because if you're building the next generation AR game where picking up and tossing real props produces physics-driven results matching what's happening in your headset display — boom, this is exactly that setup being validated! Imagine a card table or puzzle board with dozens of physical cubes around it (each one tracking its position on all faces independently), plus cameras capturing hand gestures from multiple angles so you could actually play games by moving objects instead of just waving hands. This also ties into the evolution toward full-body mocap rigs — what started as optical marker dots on human suits is now expanding outward to anything in the physical environment, not unlike how VR controllers went from simple positional tracking to being able to track their own orientation independently while you move them around freely! I'm genuinely excited that PC Gamer covered this with such solid production shots.
Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/action/they-did-motion-capture-on-a-cube/