Humans and objects move through 3-dimensional space. The Immersion Lab has a room-scale facility for measuring complex motion for biomechanics, mechanical design, or robotic controls.
Explore Immersion Lab motion capture tools using the buttons below.
Return to the capabilities page. | See all the tools.
Sample projects and research
Visualizing 3D trajectories from motion capture
In this clip from the IMMERSED IN: Athletics—Pitching in baseball seminar, MIT pitching coach Todd Carroll shows how 3D visualizations of a player's actual pitches—captured by the Optitrack system in the Immersion Lab—can serve as a teaching aid for athletes and coaches. See the full seminar abstract and video.
Dance-inspired investigation of human movement
In this talk, Postdoctoral Associate Praneeth Namburi, working with EECS professor Luca Daniel and MechE research scientist Micha Feigin-Almon, focuses his efforts on formalizing a dancer’s approach to movement. The team's overarching hypothesis is that dancers stabilize their joints through stretches, and that the best dancers and athletes are able to generalize this stretch-based joint stabilization beyond walking to their art form. To understand how dancers organize movement through stretches, they use motion tracking and electromyography.
The research team received MIT.nano Immersion Lab Gaming Program seed grants in 2019 and 2020 to further this work using the motion capture equipment and software tools of the Immersion Lab.