Epic Motion Sensor & GPS

[Illya Friedman]

Yeah I'd guess something far more accurate than GPS would be needed for data useful to 3D tracking...

Noah

Not necessarily. I've seen a demonstration of milspec GPS accurate to approximately 1 cm (in x, y & z). Understandably, it was very (very) pricey.

If calibrated to the cameras nodal it could be used for painless 3D/Virtual Sets, and a host of other related applications.

I encourage any/every camera manufacturer to invest in this concept, as it would make high quality VFX post production a breeze. To make it truly useful, the coordinates should be stored in the individual frame metadata.

I know this kind of GPS integration can (and will) be done on a mass scale at some point, I just don't know when that will be. The future is bright for this technology.

I.

 

[jbeale]

GPS has come a long way since the 1970s, both satellites and receivers, and secondary correction systems eg. DGPS. Going further and using "pseudolites" (placing your own local GPS transmitters at known fixed coordinates) you can eliminate all the complications with ionosphere delays and get real-time precision at the 1 cm level over a substantial local area (kilometers). Not sure if this could work with a typical consumer GPS receiver, and if it did, I'd assume you would need specialized firmware on it.

Stewart Cobb did his thesis on this at Stanford in 1997: http://waas.stanford.edu/~wwu/papers/gps/PDF/stuthesis.pdf

Edit: after some more reading, it turns out the research in the thesis above led to a startup company, which is now called Novariant, and they sell commercial "sub-inch" class positioning systems, based on GPS augmented by pseudolites. Main application right now seems to be automated farming; eg. tractors that plow very accurate furrows. See also: http://www.novariant.com/

 

[Jason Sinclair]

1cm inaccuracy is not good enough. There are other methods worth trying.

 

[JohnF]

This may not have anything to do with tracking features but an in-camera GPS could also provide a very accurate clock/timecode source.

If such a feature is enabled one should be able to tell all cameras to read GPS time as timecode by default. Very handy for a multiple camera shoot.

Furthermore GPS time is so accurate that it may be possible to actually sync cameras using it. Even handier for multiple camera shoot.

JohnF

 

[Dave Neathery]

This may not have anything to do with tracking features but an in-camera GPS could also provide a very accurate clock/timecode source.

If such a feature is enabled one should be able to tell all cameras to read GPS time as timecode by default. Very handy for a multiple camera shoot.

Furthermore GPS time is so accurate that it may be possible to actually sync cameras using it. Even handier for multiple camera shoot.

JohnF

I keep hoping they will do this. Right now, I have to run two coaxs to each camera: One for TriLevel sync and one to loop the timecode from cam to cam.
(It works perfectly, but it can be more than a little inconvenient at times.)

Dave

 

[Nils Ruinet]

This may not have anything to do with tracking features but an in-camera GPS could also provide a very accurate clock/timecode source.

If such a feature is enabled one should be able to tell all cameras to read GPS time as timecode by default. Very handy for a multiple camera shoot.

Furthermore GPS time is so accurate that it may be possible to actually sync cameras using it. Even handier for multiple camera shoot.

JohnF

This is definately what I'm hoping for...