Thesis-details
Overview
 
Real-time Clinical Motion Capture with HoloLens 2 ■
 
Subject ■
Gold-standard, marker-based Motion Capture systems like Vicon are expensive and lack portability, which limits their adoption in clinical settings. Recent advancements in low-cost depth sensors and Deep Learning (DL) technology have enabled the development of affordable and portable marker-based MoCap solutions [1]. In this context, we developed HoloMoCap [2], which accurately and in real-time captures motion using a portable Augmented Reality setup. The system utilizes the HoloLens depth sensor to track reflective markers placed on the subject's skin. However, the depth sensor's frame rate is 5 Frames Per Second (FPS), which is too low for clinical applications.
Kind of work ■
Objective
The objective of this thesis is to enhance the current version of HoloMoCap by increasing its frame rate to ideally 30 FPS. This will be achieved by developing a new motion tracking method that will leverage not only the depth sensor but also the other HoloLens cameras (RGB and grayscale cameras).

Description of Work
- Literature review.
- Getting familiar with the HoloLens, Unity, and HoloMoCap.
- Development of the tracking method. Two main methods will be explored to achieve higher FPS:
o Exploiting optical flow from the RGB sensor [3].
o Using the two lateral grayscale cameras for triangulation [4,5].
Framework of the Thesis ■
References
[1] Ceglia A. et al. (2025). Real-time, accurate, and opensource upper-limb musculoskeletal
using a single RGBD camera – An exploratory hand-cycling study. Comput. Biol. Med. 184, 109
[2] Zaccardi S. et al. (2025). HoloMoCap: Real-Time Clinical Motion Capture with HoloLens 2. Proc. IEEE AIxVR 2025.
[3] SukHwan Lim and A. El Gamal, "Optical flow estimation using high frame rate sequences," Proceedings 2001 International Conference on Image Processing (Cat. No.01CH37205), Thessaloniki, Greece, 2001, pp. 925-928 vol.2, doi: 10.1109/ICIP.2001.958646.
[4] C. Kunz, P. Maurer, F. Kees, P. Henrich, C. Marzi, M. Hlavac, M. Schneider, and F. Mathis-Ullrich, “Infrared marker tracking with the hololens for neurosurgical interventions,” Current Directions in Biomedical Engineering, vol. 6, p. 20200027, 09 2020
[5] C. Gsaxner, J. Li, A. Pepe, D. Schmalstieg, and J. Egger, “Inside-out instrument tracking for surgical navigation in augmented reality,” in Proceedings of the 27th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology, ser. VRST 㤝. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3489849.3489863
Expected Student Profile ■
Programming experience in Python and C#/C++ is required.
Experience with Unity gaming development software is preferred.
The candidate should be interested in computer vision and augmented reality.