Motion Capture - Files and Formats

Technological advancements has blurred the line between 3D and reality in recent times. We are presented with jaw dropping visual effects and scenes in every box office release, that most of the times we don't know the difference between 3D generated virtual reality shots and camera captured real life shots.
What is Motion Capture?
When we speak about technological advancements in 3D graphics and animation, we come across this terminology "Motion Capture" the term that wiped the worst nightmares of 3D animators from the face of 3D industry. Motion Capture is a technique where the live performances, movements of a real life actor is captured and transferred on to a CG character. Traditionally CG characters are animated manually for every movement the character has to perform. Even subtle expressions of human face has to be done manually, that's why a nightmare for 3D animator. this technique is not only used in film-making but also in military, sports, virtual reality, augmented reality, medical applications and robotics.
Motion Capture usually involves special hardwares and softwares, where the performer is fitted with marker at important points mostly joints like neck, head, shoulder, elbow etc and a camera is used to track those movements in 3d space. The captured data can be stored in a file and can be used on any CG character as the data only captures motion and has nothing to do with the visual appearance of the actor.
File formats used to store Motion Capture Data.
There are various formats in which Motion Capture Data is stored. Many of the file formats are software specific, that they can be opened only with the supported software. There are few formats that can be transferred or converted from one format to another.
The most commonly used format and supported mostly by many 3D application is .bvh - stands for Biovision Hierarchy. Usually Motion Capture Data contains two parts, Skeleton hierarchy and Motion Data. with this format we could store both the parts in a single file.
We also have another widely used format .asf and .amc, here these two files are required for animating a character, because.asf contains skeleton data and .amc contains motion data.
Applications:
Movies: Virtual characters like we have seen in Matrix, Avatar are animated with motion capture technology, also some of the best Animated features films.
Video Games: Most of the PC games involving 3D characters like first person shooters, FIFA, Cricket, Combat simulations rely on this technique.
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality: This has revolutionized human interaction with virtual objects, which has helped in development of training simualtors and 3D walkthroughs in virtual environments.
In the near future even the blurred line between virtual reality and real life will vanish, and we may not know that we live and interact in a computer generated environment.