Novelist Arthur C. Clarke famously said that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." That would be a very bold statement to apply to any equipment being demonstrated at this week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. But when you see a man step into a space set up with motion capture cameras--dressed in street clothes, not a black spandex bodysuit with Velcroed-on reflective markers--and his clean-as-a-whistle animation data pops up on a nearby computer monitor in Autodesk's industry standard animation software MotionBuilder, well, you know you're in the presence of something special.

That's exactly what we saw last Friday when the folks at Organic Motion invited us to their midtown Manhattan offices for an exclusive sneak peek at their forthcoming marker-less motion capture system. Founder and CEO Andrew Tschesnok found himself four-and-a-half years ago working on a project for which he wanted to use artificial intelligence to teach characters in a game to move more naturally by observing his own movements. One year later, he still wasn't finished. Ditto after two years. But by the four-year mark, he had something extremely worthwhile. "With traditional marker based motion capture systems, the system only tracks the markers--there is no 'viewing' the human model," Tschesnok explains. "Existing mo-cap systems are limiting and only provide collected data in a simple, 'connect the dots' representation of a moving person."

Organic Motion, Tschesnok says, is different because it visualizes and captures thousands of natural points on the subject. "We track thousands of natural points--the corner of the eyes, the edge of the arm, the bend of the knee--effectively capturing the entire person in a lifelike manner, similar to the way your eye watches edges and motion. In this manner, Organic Motion authentically tracks the entire person, enabling us to provide a full 3-D scan of the subject in real-time." Cheaper, cleaner and immediately usable animation data--what's not to like here?

The implications of this for the videogame industry are tremendous. Because Organic Motion doesn't require a dedicated space or extensive cleaning up of the data (with marker-based motion capture, certain markers become occluded, or blocked, which can throw off the animation software and require several days' worth of man-hours to refine so that it becomes usable), animators could effectively use it as a sketch pad by setting the cameras up near their workspace, jumping into the recording area themselves to capture the moves that they want, then incorporate them into their prototypes. "Instead of booking space in a studio, you can bring it much closer to the animator, and bring the actual artists themselves much closer to the process."

In addition to other entertainment-related markets, like visual effects, Organic Motion also has intriguing possibilities for medicine. Motion capture has been used as a diagnostic tool for stroke victims and people with cerebral palsy, but putting such patients into the traditional bodysuit-and-markers often ranges from difficult to impractical to impossible. That's no longer the case, thanks to Organic Motion, and the company says that a major hospital in the Northeast is working on a related pilot program. Tschesnok and president Jonathan Rand also sees applications in sports training and rehabilitation. The system, which launches in the second half of 2007, can currently only scan one person at a time; a version that can scan the motion of two people is expected by in early 2008.