Qumarion mannequin offers intuitive 3D manipulation

Ever wondered what it feels like to handle a voodoo doll? Well, I suppose you can get a semblance of that feeling with the Qumarion mannequin which you can view in action in the video above. The Qumarion mannequin is basically an input device that was specially developed to simplify the manipulation as well as posing of human-like 3D CG models on the screen. Do you need some wolfsbane and certain chants to get it up and going? No, it relies on QUMA technology instead that was co-developed by a couple of university ventures, SoftEther from University of Tsukuba, and ViVienne from The University of Electro-Communications.

The Qumarion mannequin is capable of transferring pose data from sensors located on the mannequin itself to the 3D application in real time. The mannequin itself sports 32 sensors on 16 joints, as well as data from each joint that has been transferred to the computer over USB at 120 fps, letting the 3D model display the poses more or less instantly. Captain Jack Sparrow would have definitely wanted one of these…

Edwin Kee
Categories: General
Tags: 3D