Building off some incredible work by Alex Betts, a former colleague at the NCSA, I was able to connect our Microsoft Kinect datastream directly to rigged characters in Maya. When I hit play on the timeline, my tool would bake keyframes of Kinect data into the scene, and we could then edit the curves of the performances directly in Maya’s animation curve editor. While the data wasn’t perfect (particularly due to the frustum of the Kinect), it was considered a dramatic success on a budget!