I'm the Controller Now: MIT Engineers Create a 'Second Skin' That Could One Day Track the Entire Body in VR.

Riding the Wave (Guide).

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Remember when they did motion capture on a cube? Well, more specifically, they put actor Jack Quaid in a motion capture suit and then put him inside a cube to play God of War Laufey. As cool as that advanced cube is, I think VR gamers and Vtubers are doing fresh research at MIT.

MIT engineers have created a sheet full of optical fibers that can digitally recreate its shape, even when bent and folded. According to MIT News , the team believes their technology could be turned into clothing that could then be used to accurately mirror your real-world movements in a game.

Although currently a bulky prototype, the flexible sheet could one day be worn like a second skin that could more accurately track the transformation of a surface, rather than moving, say, fixed points on traditional motion capture suits. What's arguably even more interesting, however, is that the sheet is shown in a demonstration video to remain functional even when an engineer drills it with a hole punch. Basically, the technology has a good chance of surviving any awkwardness experienced in VR.

The light from the bent optical fibers is tracked inside the sheet and then interpreted by a specially developed algorithm. As the sheet bends, it bends the fibers, which also determines how much light can pass through them. This type of structure is known as a waveguide.

Qifan Yu is a mechanical engineering graduate student at MIT, and a co-author of the paper based on this project. Yu explains, "People have used waveguides to understand the shape of a line, applied them to a robot arm to see how it curves, but they haven't been used to recognize the shape of a surface, to reconstruct the three-dimensional shape of a surface. That's what we want to do here."

According to Yu, the team's algorithm recreates the actual sheet motion with a margin of error that is "less than 0.4 cm." "Existing designs, which are based on rigid sensors, have an error of about 1 to 2 cm," he adds.

In addition to recording performance in greater detail, this technology can be used to control in-game movements or even assist patients undergoing physical therapy. "In physical therapy, you often need to collect patient data about how your arm moves and stretches during rehabilitation. For example, surface contour measurements can be very helpful in this way," says Yu.

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The team is planning to remove the prototype. Currently, optical fibers are 1 mm thick, but alternative manufacturing methods could potentially make these fibers tens of micrometers thinner than a human hair. Let's just say, no matter how good it makes me look, I'm looking forward to donning a shape-recognition suit in the future and jumping into virtual reality with both feet.

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Jess has been writing about games for over ten years, with a significant portion of that time spent working on PLAY print publications and PlayStation Official Magazine. When he's not checking out all things hardware here, he's either making an impassioned defense of a 7/10 game, daydreaming about his first novel, or envying the last time he got chased around a field with a giant foam sword.

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