Distance learning is becoming more mainstream thanks in large part to the traditionally brick and mortar colleges who have embraced the possibilities it offers. Even some Ivy League institutions now offer the opportunity to take some portion of a degree program’s curriculum online. Interactive multimedia materials and better access to faculty in years past combined with a highly computer literate population have made online learning popular with students from all walks of life. But what about after college, when it’s time to get a job? Does an online degree stack up to a campus based degree in the eyes of employers?

The answer, as one might guess, is both yes and no, or more aptly, “It depends on the situation.” Some employers from specific industries only care that you have a degree or meet the basic hiring criteria. Those industries are typically associated with jobs that are in demand or tied to technology in some way. Few human resource managers from an information technology based firm would scoff at an online degree because of the nature of their business. Likewise, few teaching positions at the grade school or high school level are off limits to the qualified regardless of where their degree came from as the position requires state certification and there is always a shortage of applicants.

For mid level managers of Fortune 500 companies, pedigree counts. Few hiring managers in the business world are going to be as impressed with a degree from University of Phoenix as they would be with a degree from San Jose State University, much less a school with a nationally recognized business program like Dartmouth or Northwestern. That’s not to say that a person with a degree from college or university typically associated with distance learning can’t find a great position in business, finance, banking or management, just that certain industries are going to be far more aware of their educational background than others.

For graduate level studies, an online degree fares better in most industries. Distance learning degrees tend to take on the same luster as those offered by state universities. You may not get top billing when going up against a master’s of business administration graduate who went to Harvard with an online MBA, but you can easily compete with someone who went to the University of Kentucky.

Regardless of whether a person has an online degree or one from a traditional campus based college, one thing is certain. Experience is the great equalizer. If you find employment in your field and do stellar work, the combination of any degree and your track record will eventually open doors.

History of Motion Capture for Computer Character Animation

The use of motion capture for computer character animation is relatively new, having begun in the late 1970’s, and only now beginning to become widespread. Motion capture is the recording of human body movement (or other movement) for immediate or delayed analysis and playback. Motion capture for computer character animation involves the mapping of human motion onto the motion of a computer character. To get convincing motion for the human characters, Disney studios traced animation over film footage of live actors playing out the scenes. This method, called rotoscoping, has been successfully used for human characters ever since.The rotoscoping was invented by max fleischer in 1915.The first cartoon character has to be rotoscope was “koko the clown”.He want to use koko to convinced the big studio in the new process for the project.Walt Disney use the rotoscoping technique in 1937 to create motion of human characteristic in snow white.The decision of using rotoscoping technique is realistic human motion. In 1970’s it began to be feasible to animate characters by computer, animators adapted traditional techniques,includingrotoscoping.There is several name in the motion capture history;

Pioneers of Motion Capture

Eadweard Muybridge (1830 – 1904) – pioneer photographer of the moving image

Étienne-Jules Marey – First person to analyze human and animal motion with video

Harold E. “Doc” Edgerton (1903-1990) -High Speed stroboscopic photography

Max Fleischer (1915) – Rotoscoping

Lee Harrison III (1960’s) – Scanimation

Walt Disney – Multiplane Camera

The motion capture problems

The goal of motion capture is to record the movement of a performer (typically,but not always,human) in a compact and usable manner.Computer graphics and computer vision usually abstract the body into a small number of rigid segments that rotate relative to one another.The motion capture problem we consider therefore must have the following form: given a single stream of video observations of a performer, compute a 3D skeletal representation of the motion of sufficient quality to be useful for animation.

The specific challenges of animation make the problem even tougher.

- Unlike applications such as recognition and surveillance, animation does care about small details.

- Jitter and wobbles often come from uncertainty in computations,

- The importance of high frequencies means that filtering is not a viable tool for noise removal at video sampling rates.

- The unpredictability and unusual motions that we need to capture limit the strength of the models we can apply.