UROP Fun Fun Fun

Apparently I wrote most of it (ok all but the pics) and just didn't take the time to post it...

This year I got my first ever UROP, Undergraduate Research Opportunity! It’s a great project...we call it “Second Skin, a bio-I/O platform (Optical motion capture)”

Long story wordy (ie. the official project description): We are building a wearable fabric to support millimeter accurate location and bio-parameter tracking at thousands of points on the body. Such a fabric can compute and predict 3D representation of human activity and use them for a closed-loop control to augment human performance. The goal is to support a detailed analysis and control of higher-level human activity. The basic technology uses a new optical motion capture method we have recently developed and the first phase of the project involves building next generation optical communication tools.

Basically, the final goal is to make a purdy suit that can tell you everything. However we are nowhere near that! It’s a brand new project—we started setting things up during the spring term. The first thing that we’re doing is setting up the motion capture stuff...

The standard motion capture method today uses those brightly colored balls, many very expensive high speed cameras or scanning lasers, and expensive, hard to use software. In other words, motion capture is prohibitively expensive and complicated for small-scale or start-up applications. In response to this, my UROP advisor (and the company he worked for) developed a new method.

The basic idea is that there are tracking tags that can be placed around the body or other objects that tracks and calculates its location. The system can support an unlimited number of tags in a scene, and each tag has a unique id thus eliminating marker reacquisition issues.Unlike previous methods, which employ high, this system captures the scene using the simplest possible optical devices – an IR LED with a passive binary mask used as the transmitter (in projector form) and a photosensor used as the receiver. We will strategically place a set of optical transmitters to encode the area of interest and attach photosensor chips to the objects we wish to track.

Right now I’m working on redesigning the original chip that my advisor worked on so that it has just what we need on it.

This is what the original schematic looked like:
ugly

This is mine:

And this is what the layout looks like:

I'm loving it...so much fun!