Qualisys, a leader in sports performance motion capture technology, debuted its markerless motion capture capabilities for 3D baseball analysis at the 77th annual American Baseball Coaches Association (ABCA) trade show.
Markerless capture and analysis for pitching is made possible with a Qualisys video or hybrid camera system thanks to the Theia 3D software, which processes the data captured by the cameras using rigid-body tracking and inverse kinematics to fully solve the 3D pose of skeletal segments. Both Qualisys and Theia 3D have made it a priority that their solutions maintain biomechanical accuracy and relevance of the results to follow standard practice and conventions in the realm of scientific research.
“For the past 30 years, marker-based has been the gold standard, and markerless is just now on the on the horizon. We’ve seen a lot of advances within the technology and we have done validation studies with Theia markerless, and have seen great results,” explains Mike Martin, director of baseball operations at Qualisys. “Now we have both solutions. It’s a convenience to say we don’t need to put the markers on or we’re just going to do a markerless analysis for this, and then we have the option to also go marker-based.”
At this years’ ABCA, coaches, physical therapists, and baseball organizations, from Little League to Major League Baseball, were able to explore the full range of functionalities that the Qualisys system brings to the table.
