Are you curious about careers in science?

Hi, I'm Aikem, and today I'm with Lia Fry.

Can you tell me what you do and where we are?

I am a motion capture technician here at Haptic Studio in Lansing, Michigan.

A motion capture technicia helps bring characters to life.

It's mostly used for film and video game productions.

So we'll take the movements of an actor on stage, and we'll put it onto a digital character and make it an animation.

How is STEM involved in your work?

STEM is involved in a lot of different aspects of motion capture.

The biggest one is the technology.

There are a bunch of cameras scattered all around the trusses.

These cameras, they shoot out infrared light, which then reflects off of the markers that we put on our actors.

We'll also use mathematics a lot, specifically geometry.

We'll take our digital environments, measure them out, and then we can recreate them out here in the space.

Want to give motion capture a try?

Yeah I would love to.

Let's do it.

I'm going to give you this suit.

Here are the markers that we use for our motion capture.

And so wha we're doing with all of these is we're trying to find specific parts of your body that are going to be moving the most.

And last but not least, this one on the very top.

We're going to get you out there and get you calibrated.

Let's go.

And what we do is T-pose.

This just helps the syste have like a common base point.

It's actually so cool.

What advice do you have for kids who want to pursue a career like yours?

I would say stay curious if you want to go into game development, play games.

There's so muc you can learn, just like there's lots of cool storie to tell in movies and in books.

And now action.

We can do whatever we want.

Do some jumping jacks.

So figure out what makes you motivate and just have fun on your job.

And yeah, just pursue it.

Go ahead and get your running start and go for it.

Okay and then we can go watch it back.

Now here's the playback of your epic dive into the bean bags.

Today I calibrated my knowledge of STEM with Lia Fry.

Explore your possibilities.