“We grew the business to 240 people,” said O’Brien. The team built a business around that product, which went very well–for a while. The sensor tech wasn’t working for fingers.” The team knew right then they had a great product idea. We looked at the gloves that were out there, and they just weren’t used in the actual studios. It took months and huge amounts of money, and plus puts the brakes on the creative process. There’s so much detail based on what the character is interacting with. But inevitably, because they had no good way to capture hands, their figures would have ‘ninja hands.’ But hands are a really key part of what makes us human! So these places would literally have teams of animators drawings hands on the characters. “They were all very good at capturing body motions and facial movements.
“We hopped on some planes and went and visited some motion-capture studios,” he said. When Ben O’Brien, CEO of StretchSense, a private Auckland, New Zealand-based tech startup that produces motion-capture gloves, and his co-founders first came up with the idea for a better way of electronically capturing hand motions, they decided to go firsthand (no pun intended) to check out whether it was a marketable opportunity. The StretchSense MoCap Pro Glove and its Hand Engine integration software suite.
