Vizard Enterprise Edition and motion capture
 

I received some hints that Vizard Enterprise Edition is (in some way) more suitable to use with motion capture data, than Developers Edition is. On the website and forum I haven't found any confirmation of this, but juuust in case, I ask...

The Enterprise and Development edition of Vizard are equally capable of handling motion capture data. Enterprise edition will get you cluster support and the ability to create "protected" published EXEs.

Both Vizard Development and Vizard Enterprise are able to handle MoCap data in terms of reading in Mocap data, like data from Intersense, Ascension, WorldViz PPT, etc.).

However, if you refer to Vizard Live Characters

http://www.worldviz.com/products/liv...ers/index.html

i.e. if you want to live animate avatars from streamed in MoCap data, you need to purchase the add-on Motionbuilder plugin for Vizard Live Characters (costs $4995), which requires Vizard Enterprise.
You will also need Motionbuilder, in order to interface to your Motion Capture System system.

For Motion Capture, we have the most experience with the PhaseSpace system which is technically a great system (for a pricepoint of about $50k for an 8-cam system which does mocap in a 3m by 3m by 2m area).
However, the Vizard Mocap plugin interfaces to Motionbuilder, which means all systems that plug into Motionbuilder are supported.

Another system that seems to be lower price point and works well (and plugs into PPT for large area tracking and Mocap) is the MOVEN system which uses inertial sensors. I don't remember what it costs exactly, but I think there are configurations below 50k available.

Live Mocap and streaming onto Characters under VR is something that has been pretty much impossible so far so it's brandnew technology that enables a lot of interesting possibilities.

The drawback is that good Mocap systems are expensive and that it increases the complexity of the whole Virtual Reality setup.

Anyways, that's a long answer, hope it helps.

That did really help a lot; thanks to you both! I've only got two more things to say/ask:
* Live Characters is still in development phase, I presume?
* I'd recommend to add this USP to the "Compare Editions" page :-).

Thanks again! Thomas

Vizard Live Characers is a finished product at this point.
As mentioned, what you need for using it is

- Vizard Enterprise
- the Vizard Motionbuilder plugin
- Motionbuilder
- a motion capture system that's compatible with Motionbuilder
- Vizard Complete Characters if you want to animate the 100 avatars. otherwise, with Vizard itself, you only have two avatars for animation, a man and a woman.

Your comment about the webpage is correct, we will get it updated asap.
It's a new feature and development was just finished in July/August.

have fun!