Tobias Manroth, student project, summer 2014

In the course of the student project ‘Interactive Systems’ a web page with an interactive 3D preview of human body motions was developed in order to easily browse the motion capture (Mo-cap) database of the Cologne University of Applied Sciences.

The web page is divided into two parts. On the left side the user can filter the entries of the database for the actor, the played role, the mood and for other attributes which describe what the actor is doing.

When the user clicks on a database entry an interactive 3D preview is shown on the right side of the page. In order to support this client side JavaScript code fetches the motion data (BVH format) from the server and parses its content. Finally, a stick figure is created and is moving exactly the way the actor was recorded. The 3D rendering uses WebGL which nowadays is supported by any major browser, even on many smart phones. The user can stop the animation at any time, can rotate and zoom the view as desired. A slider enables the user to find a certain point in time like in a movie and allows him to analyse every single frame of the motion.

Due to the interactive 3D preview there is no need to download and open the file in another program. This 3D preview makes browsing the database extremely convenient and gives the user much more freedom to interact with a given motion than using a series of static pictures or a single view point video.

Link to the web application