The history
From a galloping horse and a man in a striped suit to creatures that act live on set: 150 years of turning movement into numbers.
People first studied movement with photographs, then traced it by hand. Psychologists showed that a few moving dots are enough to see a person. Gait labs, games and then films built systems that turn those dots into 3D skeletons, and actors learned to perform creatures. Today capture works outdoors, underwater, and with no suit at all.
1878
Stop-action photos of a galloping horse
Eadweard Muybridge, Palo Alto, USA
1883
Suit with bright marks on a black body
Étienne-Jules Marey, Paris, France
1915
Rotoscope (tracing live action)
Max Fleischer, New York, USA
1973
Point-light walker experiments
Gunnar Johansson, Uppsala, Sweden
2000
Feature-length film made with mocap
Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists, Pentafour, Chennai and Los Angeles
2004
Feature film shot entirely on a capture stage
The Polar Express, Sony Pictures Imageworks and Vicon
2014
India's first photorealistic mocap feature
Kochadaiiyaan
1878 – 1972
Muybridge and Marey take movement apart with cameras. Marey's black suit with white lines is the first marker suit. Fleischer and Disney trace real performers onto drawn characters.
1878
June 1878
Muybridge lined up a row of cameras beside a racetrack. Threads across the track fired the shutters one after another as the horse ran past, catching each phase of its stride.
Why it mattered. It proved that a camera could take movement apart, and showed that all four hooves leave the ground at once.
1882
Marey, a doctor who studied how animals move, built a chronophotographic gun that took 12 pictures a second, all from one viewpoint, to study birds in flight.
Why it mattered. Measuring motion from many timed pictures is exactly what a mocap camera still does, only faster.
1883
Marey dressed a man in black with thin white stripes and dots along his arms and legs, then photographed him walking and running in front of a black wall. Only the white lines showed, so each photo became a moving stick figure.
Why it mattered. Black suit, bright marks, dark background: it is the idea behind every optical marker suit today.
1915
1915 (patent granted 9 October 1917)
Fleischer projected film of a real person, one frame at a time, onto glass and traced it onto paper. Dave Fleischer, dressed as a clown, was the reference for Koko the Clown in Out of the Inkwell.
Why it mattered. Copying a real performer's movement into a drawn character is the goal of motion capture, done by hand.
1937
After Fleischer's patent ran out, Disney animators filmed live actors and used rotoscoping as reference for Snow White and the Prince, to make their movement look human.
Why it mattered. It showed that audiences read real human motion as more believable, a big reason mocap exists.
1973 – 1998
Johansson shows a few moving lights read as a person. Labs and gait clinics build camera systems that triangulate markers, and games and adverts start using them.
1973
Johansson fixed small lights to an actor's main joints and filmed them moving in the dark. When the dots were still, viewers saw a random pattern. The moment they moved, people instantly saw someone walking, running or dancing.
Why it mattered. It proved that a few moving points hold most of what we read in body movement, which is why a few dozen markers can capture a performance.
1983
April 1983
A performer wore a suit with LEDs on the joints. Two cameras with special light sensors each reported the 2D position of every LED, and a computer combined them into 3D points that drove a stick figure live.
Why it mattered. It was triangulation from two cameras driving a digital character, the core of optical mocap.
1984
1984 (first product 1979)
Vicon's early camera systems were built for clinical gait analysis: measuring how children with cerebral palsy walk before and after surgery. Hospitals and universities helped set standard ways of placing markers.
Why it mattered. Medicine came first. The marker sets and methods that films use grew out of gait labs.
1985
January 1985
For the advert Brilliance, the team filmed a real actress with reference points marked on her body, and a computer tracked those points to move a chrome computer-graphics robot.
Why it mattered. It was one of the first times captured human motion drove a CG character on television.
1990
For the scene where people walk behind an airport X-ray scanner, the team recorded the actors with motion capture to animate glowing CG skeletons. Accounts differ on how much of the capture data ended up in the final shots.
Why it mattered. It is often named as an early feature-film use of motion capture.
1999 – 2010
Mocap drives main characters. Gollum makes it acting, The Polar Express shoots a whole film on a stage, and Avatar adds head-mounted cameras and a virtual camera.
1999
Star Wars: Episode I featured Jar Jar Binks, the first main character in a feature film created with motion capture from an actor's performance.
Why it mattered. Mocap moved from background extras to a leading role.
2000
28 January 2000
Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists was the first feature-length computer-animated film made with motion capture. Actors were captured in Los Angeles in 1997, and a couple of hundred animators in Madras built the film.
Why it mattered. An Indian studio led the first full-length mocap film, years before Hollywood's big ones.
2001
July 2001
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within aimed for photorealistic human characters, animated with motion capture. It was the first widely released film made this way.
Why it mattered. It showed how hard it is to make digital humans feel alive, even with real motion.
2002
December 2002
Serkis acted Gollum on set with the other actors, then again in a marker suit on a capture stage. In The Two Towers his body motion streamed live onto the CG Gollum; animators used his face and voice as the guide for Gollum's face.
Why it mattered. It turned mocap into acting. People began to talk about performance capture and the actor behind the creature.
2004
November 2004
The Polar Express used 72 cameras around a capture area about 10 feet (3 m) square. Up to four actors were captured together, bodies and faces: each wore about 48 body markers and 152 small face markers.
Why it mattered. It was the first film shot entirely on a motion-capture stage, and showed face capture's promise and problems.
2005
December 2005
For King Kong, Serkis studied gorillas at London Zoo and in Rwanda. He had 135 small markers glued to his face, about two hours of make-up a day, to drive the ape's expressions.
Why it mattered. Face markers mapped a human face onto a very different creature face, a big step in retargeting.
2009
December 2009
For Avatar, actors wore skull caps with a tiny camera on a boom in front of the face, instead of hundreds of glued markers. Cameron used a virtual camera to see the Na'vi in Pandora live, on a capture stage described as six times larger than any before.
Why it mattered. The head-mounted camera and virtual camera became standard tools of performance capture.
By the numbers
Two light sensors in 1983 grew to dozens of cameras on big film stages (SIGGRAPH, AWN, Wikipedia).
2011 – today
Capture moves outdoors and underwater, game engines make it real time, and machine learning finds poses in ordinary video and phones.
2011
August 2011
Rise of the Planet of the Apes took performance capture out of the studio onto real locations, including a battle on a Golden Gate Bridge set. A camera that could see the capture markers in daylight made it possible.
Why it mattered. Mocap no longer needed a dark stage; creatures could act beside live actors on real sets.
2014
23 May 2014
Kochadaiiyaan was captured at the Centroid lab at Pinewood Studios with 48 cameras, and Rajinikanth performed his triple role in a marker suit. Big Indian effects films such as Ra.One (2011) and Baahubali (2015) also leaned on VFX, though published accounts say little about how much mocap each used.
Why it mattered. It was billed as India's first photorealistic motion-capture feature.
2016
July 2016
On stage at SIGGRAPH, actress Melina Juergens performed as Senua from the game Hellblade. Her body and face were captured and rendered live in a game engine, then cut into a finished scene in minutes. It won Best Real-Time Graphics and Interactivity.
Why it mattered. Game engines made real-time performance capture good enough to be close to final.
2017
OpenPose was the first open-source system to find the body keypoints of many people in ordinary video in real time, using deep learning and part affinity fields.
Why it mattered. It started the markerless wave: pose from video, no suit.
2017
November 2017
The iPhone X's TrueDepth camera projects over 30,000 invisible infrared dots onto the face. Apple's ARKit turns them into 52 blend-shape weights, such as jaw open and brow up, many times a second.
Why it mattered. Facial capture that once needed a studio became something anyone could try at home.
2020
June 2020
BlazePose found 33 body landmarks in real time on a mobile phone, using only its ordinary camera.
Why it mattered. Markerless capture shrank from a computer lab to a pocket.
2020
A study compared OpenPose with several video cameras against a marker system. About 80% of joint errors were under 30 mm, but some were over 40 mm. Markers still win when millimetres matter.
Why it mattered. It measured the trade-off: markerless is easy and cheap, optical is precise.
2021
January 2021 (film released June 2023)
The motion-capture shoot for Adipurush began in January 2021 with Xsens inertial suits for the body, and a separate head-mounted system for faces.
Why it mattered. Inertial suits let big Indian productions capture without a huge optical stage.
2022
December 2022
For Avatar: The Way of Water, the team captured actors underwater in a huge tank built at Manhattan Beach Studios (reports of its size vary). Air bubbles act as tiny wiggling mirrors that fool the cameras, so actors and crew held their breath while performing.
Why it mattered. Capture moved into places once thought impossible for optical systems.
Did you know?
A mocap camera does not record a picture of the actor. It sends only the centres of bright dots, often 120 times a second or more.
A lab test of one optical system measured an average error of just 0.15 mm for a still marker.
Johansson's viewers recognised a walking person from about a dozen moving lights, but saw only random dots when the lights stood still.
On The Polar Express, each actor wore about 200 markers, 152 of them on the face, and 72 cameras watched up to four actors at once.
An iPhone's face camera projects more than 30,000 invisible dots to measure the shape of your face.
The people
1830 – 1904 · Physiologist and inventor · France
Dressed a man in black with white stripes to photograph movement as a stick figure.
1883 – 1972 · Animator and inventor · Austria-Hungary and USA
Invented the rotoscope to trace real motion into cartoons.
1911 – 1998 · Psychologist · Sweden
Showed that a dozen moving lights are enough to see a person walking.
born 1964 · Actor and director · UK
Played Gollum, Kong and Caesar, and made performance capture a craft of acting.
born 1950 · Actor · India
Performed a triple role in a marker suit for Kochadaiiyaan, India's first photorealistic mocap film.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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