Remember when they did motion capture on a cube? Well, more specifically, they put actor Jack Quaid in a motion capture suit and then they put him inside a cube for his role in God of War Laufey. As charming as that cutting edge cuboid is, I think VR gamers and Vtubers are gonna be all over fresh research out of MIT.

Engineers at MIT have developed a sheet full of optical fibres that can digitally reconstruct its own shape even as it is flexed and folded. According to MIT News, the team reckons their tech could be fashioned into a garment that could then be used to accurately mirror your real-world movements in a game.

Though currently a bulky prototype, the flexible sheet could one day be worn like a second skin that can more accurately track the transformation of a surface, rather than the movement of, say, fixed points on a traditional motion capture suit. What's arguably even cooler though is that the sheet is shown in a demo video to remain functional even as an engineer pierces it with a hole puncher. Basically, this tech stands a good chance of surviving any clumsiness experienced while in VR.

Light from the bendy optical fibres inside the sheet is tracked and then interpreted by a specially developed algorithm. As the sheet bends, so do the fibres, which also dictates how much light can pass through them. This kind of structure is known as a waveguide.

Qifan Yu is a mechanical engineering graduate student at MIT, and one of the co-authors of the paper based on this project .

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