Short answers, pulled from the story.
Researchers at the University of Southern California began using motion capture to analyze human movement for biomechanics studies in 1973. This work laid the foundation for what would become a global industry decades later.
Didier Pourcel and his team at Gribouille produced the first virtual actor in 1993 based on French comedian Richard Bohringer. They used nascent tools to clone both the body and face of the performer into a digital form without manual keyframing.
Some modern setups cost twenty thousand dollars for eight cameras while others reach eighty thousand dollars for full-body inertial suits. Costs for equipment range from one thousand dollars for basic inertial suits up to eighty thousand dollars for comprehensive optical setups.
Purdue University houses the world's largest indoor motion capture system within the PURT facility containing six hundred thousand cubic feet of tracking volume. Sixty cameras operate there with millimeter accuracy to provide ground truth data for evaluating unmanned aerial systems.
Olympic figure skater Yuzuru Hanyu graduated from Waseda University in 2020 after submitting a thesis analyzing jumps using data from thirty-one sensors placed on his body. This work allowed him to evaluate human motion across multiple biomechanical factors.