Company makes 'Avatar' possible on a gamer's budget | Business

Redmond's high tech corridor is fast becoming a gamers' Hollywood.  

There are roughly 100 video game producers in our area, ranging from the big boys at Microsoft and Nintendo to one-man shops that are producing Flash video games for mobile phones.

Cutting costs while producing high-quality entertainment is the holy grail for any studio, whether it be for a release in theatres or for a game console.

Organic Motion of New York City have come up with an affordable way for game producers to use real-time motion capture technology to main characters.

"Avatar" was a blockbuster movie. But an avatar is also the name of a digital role playing character in a video game. If you've ever played computer war game, that soldier you control is your avatar.

In the movie "Avatar," the film's producer's spent millions of dollars on an elaborate high end 3-D motion capture system that required actors to where blue skin tight suits that were covered with markers known as targets for a computer animator to use.

It's a highly effective system, and at its core is a staple in the movie industry. But Organic Motion saw an issue. The computer can only track people wearing precisely placed and calibrated markers. The setup is time consuming and costly.

After four years of development, Organic Motion's founder Andrew Tschesnok created the first "markerless" motion capture system. It allows actors to basically wear anything they want.  

Digital Double in Redmond is the first studio in the Northwest to use the Organic Motion system. Upstairs in a room no bigger than an average classroom, a series of 16 strategically placed LED cameras surround a white reflective stage.  

It doesn't matter what you came to work in; the system can capture your movements and translate them into a digital character in real time.

"Instead of playing connect the dots like old systems do, we are actually looking at the full 360 degrees of the person," said Chris Michaels, a spokesman for Organic Motion. "Our system looks at the actor as a real human would".

The system measures various gradations of light bouncing off the actor being filmed. A computer maps the gradation as movements and translates those movements into an invisible skeleton that an animator can manipulate.

"You can jump in and within five minutes, start capturing moves" says Digital Double CEO Kamal Siegel. He believes his system is an affordable alternative to the expensive motion capture studios used in Hollywood.

With at least a dozen game producers within five miles of his Redmond facility, Siegel is betting that proximity will work.

"Because of that it's a lot more affordable for companies to come to us and have us provide the service instead of outsourcing to larger facilities in the LA area."

While "Avatar" director James Cameron is unlikely to forgo his custom-built 3-D capture system for Organic Motion's system, the price point may entice local game producers on smaller budgets to give it a try.

With the highest systems costing roughly $40,000 an hour in Hollywood, the Organic Motion system is only $80,000 total.