Manus Core

Partner studio: Puny Human

Concept

The software layer that drives professional motion-capture gloves — converting hand motion into raw sensor data, a calibrated skeleton, and retargeted data mapped onto virtual characters, then streaming all of it live into game engines and professional motion-capture packages.

Requirement

Hardware middleware lives or dies on its integrations. The software has to stream low-latency hand and finger data into Unreal and Unity and into professional mocap toolchains, and retarget it convincingly onto arbitrary character rigs. That is engine plugin engineering and real-time character pipeline work — a rarer skill combination than either discipline alone.

Approach

Engineers with production experience in both engine plugin development and technical animation worked on the integration and retargeting layers, applying rigging and animation knowledge from shipped titles to the problem of making live glove data drive character rigs cleanly and at low latency.

Delivery scope

• Engine plugin development
• Real-time data streaming integration
• Character retargeting
• Rigging and technical animation
• Unreal Engine and Unity integration
• Low-latency performance optimization

Results

• Engaged 2021
• Middleware supports live streaming into Unreal Engine, Unity and the major professional motion-capture packages
• 4–10 person-months delivered, across 1–2 engineers
• Demonstrated transfer of game-engine and technical animation skill into hardware middleware — a higher-margin, less cyclical market than publisher contracts

Engine: Unreal Engine, Unity.