2026

arXiv

Towards Real-World Wearable Motion Reconstruction

Andrea Boscolo Camiletto, Rishabh Dabral, Eduardo Alvarado, Thabo Beeler, Marc Habermann, Christian Theobalt

Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarland Informatics Campus, Saarbrücken, Germany

Keywords

motion capture, wearable sensors, multimodal learning, human pose estimation

Abstract

The modern-day surge in popularity of wearable devices poses a fundamentally unique motion capture problem: reconstructing full-body movement from any set of sensing hardware worn at a given moment. Yet, most research efforts assume fixed sensor configurations (e.g., IMU suits or HMD-centric rigs) and cannot generalize across them. In contrast, we argue that motion capture should prioritize unobtrusive and lightweight devices such as smartphones, smartwatches, smart glasses, and smart insoles, and study the interplay between them. To this end, we make three contributions. First, we present a large-scale multimodal dataset synchronizing these consumer-grade sensors with ground-truth 3D motion, spanning 50 diverse activities including everyday tasks, sports, and social interactions. Second, we propose WHIP, a baseline generative model that reconstructs motion from arbitrary subsets of available sensors, robustly handling missing modalities and producing physically plausible motions. Third, we conduct a systematic study of sensor complementarity, quantifying how different modalities complement one another. Code and dataset are available at this URL.

Moticon's Summary

The researchers created a vast dataset and a generative model to achieve full-body motioncapture using combinations of everyday wearablesensors. During the study, participants were equipped with Moticon opengo sensorinsoles to collect data on plantar pressure, angular velocity, and linear acceleration. The addition of these sensorinsoles provided critical cues on balance, gait, and foot-ground contact events. This specific plantar data significantly improved the pose accuracy and reconstruction of lower-body and leg joint movements, proving highly synergistic when combined with upper-body sensors like smartwatches.

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