Open Access

Florian Herrmann, Steffen Krüger, Philipp Lensing

• With human motion capture being used in various research fields and the entertainment industry, suitable systems need to be selected based on individual use cases. In this paper we propose a novel software framework that is capable to simulate, compare, and evaluate any motion capturing system in a purely virtual way. Given an avatar as input character, a user can create an individual tracking setup by simply placing trackers on the avatars skin. The physical behavior of the placed trackers is configurable and extendable to simulate any existing tracking device. Thus it is possible e.g. to add or modify drift, noise, latency, frequency, or any other parameter of the virtual trackers. Additionally it is possible to integrate an individual inverse kinematics (IK) solving system which is steered by the placed trackers. This allows to compare not only different tracker setups, but also different IK solving systems. Finally users can plug-in custom error metrics for comparison of the calc ulated body poses against ground truth poses. To demonstrate the capabilities of our proposed framework, we present a proof of concept by implementing a simplified simulation model of the HTC vive tracking system to control the VRIK solver from the FinalIK plugin and calculate error metrics for positional, angular, and anatomic differences.