MotionRender: A simple Python implementation of video motion visualization for 3D motion capture data

Abstract

We describe a Python library project for generating animations of simple 3D motion capture data points. The motion capture method is agnostic with respect to this visualizaiton tool, expecting a time series of time stamped coordinates captured in a 3-dimensional space. One of the advantages of this tool is the simple data format design. This tool was developed originally for a Kinect system implementing skeleton tracking of 15 joint positions, where each data point consists of an accurate time of capture (time stamp), and 3 accurate coordinate (x, y, z) positions of each of the 15 joints at each time step. In addition to the motion capture time series, all that is needed is a joint graph file describing the relationship of the joint edges to one another. This library can be extended to visualize and create animations of motion capture data that can be reformulated using this basic structure of a time series of time stamped 3D coordinates and a joint graph description file. This library should be useful as is, or with easy modification, for many such visualization requirements of similar motion capture data.