I'm a programmer with some interest in animation (but not too much
knowledge about it). Recently I've been developing applications for
the iPhone and iPod Touch. These devices have an accelerometer built
in and I had the idea that it might be nice to write a program that
would use the accelerometer to record simple motion sequences by using
the iPhone. I.E. you would tap a button and the device would start
recording, then you carry out a motion for a few seconds and then tap
the button to stop recording, and the motion is sent as a file to your
email or uploaded by WiFi to your computer. I imagine this may be
handy to create simple animations or camera panning motions for video
games and such. In a more advanced implementation the software would
include the ability to record device orientation (i.e. spatial
position and rotation data) as well, although that looks like it might
require strapping two separate iPhones back to back - the iPhone has
just a single accelerometer so cannot reliably detect rotations in
real time).
Since it would take a fair amount of work to create something like
this, I wanted to ask whether this would be useful for people on this
group or whether such simple motion capture devices already exist for
comparable prices to the iPhone (let's say, a few hundred dollars).
Specifically, if you find that such a program would be useful for you,
can you comment on:
1. How much you might be willing to pay for such a product ($50? $100?
$200? More?) -- I am talking about just the software, not the iPod
Touch or iPhone which you would have to buy separately; and:
2. What file formats for motion capture would you like to see
sup****ted by such an application, and can you suggest somewhere to
read about the specs for those formats?
Thanks!
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