Grand Challenge — How to Build a Motion Capture Lab: Overview, Practical Advice, and Challenges

An inspiring session on building a motion-capture lab, contrasting a high-end facility with a low-cost portable alternative.

Motion Capture Lab at the MPI for Psycholinguistics (Sachit Misra)

The Motion Capture Lab at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics is a cutting-edge facility designed to capture the subtlety of human movement with precision. It enables researchers to capture motion at very high frame rates and map relations between language, cognition, and embodied motion through high-resolution tracking. Equipped with state-of-the-art Vicon cameras, face tracking, and sync technology, it offers a comprehensive setup for capturing full-body movement, facial expressions, and micro-movements that traditional video methods might miss — with powerful tools to recreate motion and build stimuli.

Donders Mobile Multimodal Lab (Wim Pouw)

While multimodality is increasingly recognised as a natural mode of communication, empirical investigations into the “hyper” multimodal nature of communication have been limited by the challenges of setting up, collecting, and analysing time-varying signals with different modality characteristics. To address this, we developed a practical manual and coding library for capturing human behaviour in an ecologically valid, multidimensional framework, using open-source resources to help researchers assemble a low-cost (~2K–15K), portable lab. It records multiple frame-synced 2D videos for reconstructed 3D body motion (e.g. with freemocap, pose2sim), audio, and physiological signals (e.g. ECG, EMG), integrated through the Lab Streaming Layer for precise synchronisation — making the study of multimodality easier and more equitable for labs with and without extensive resources.