For the longest time, controlling a character in a game has meant a controller in your hands or a keyboard under your fingers.
Sure, we’ve got motion controls in the world, and VR has taken things a step further, but a lot of the time, the large studio setups or full-body motion suits seem inaccessible or cumbersome to the casual gamer.
Sony recently decided to change that.
The Sony Mocopi is a set of six small motion sensors that strap onto your body, tracking your movement in real time and translating it directly onto a digital avatar. Wrists, ankles, hips, and head are all covered, and once everything is connected, your movements become the input.
No cameras. No full-body suits. No dedicated studio setup. Just you, moving around your living room.
Each sensor is lightweight and connects via Bluetooth to your phone or PC, feeding motion data into supported apps and platforms. The system uses that data to build a full-body representation of your movement, which then drives your avatar.
Raise your arm, and your avatar follows. Lean forward, it does too. Shake what your mama gave ya’ and, well, you get the point. It all translates in a way that feels just a little bit surreal the first time you see yourself mirrored like that on a digital platform.
Speaking of, Mocopi works with platforms like VRChat and other avatar-driven spaces. You will, of course, still need your VR headset to see things and VR controllers to perform actions, but the Mocopi sensors allow your whole body to be a part of the system, not just your hands, eyes and ears.
To add to all that, Sony Mocopi is not just built for gaming. Content creators, app developers, or anyone else who uses motion capture for prototyping and the like can quickly set up the sensors and get 3D motion capture up and running in just a few minutes.
Of course, it’s not perfect.
Because it relies on sensors rather than external cameras, it can drift over time, and it won’t match the precision of a full professional mocap setup. But considering what it replaces, it’s hard to be too critical.
The Mocopi kit comes in at around $450 internationally, which lands somewhere between R8,000 and R10,000, depending on how you get it into South Africa. Amazon South Africa seems to be the only online retailer with a listing, but it’s marked as “Currently unavailable,” so importing may be your only option.
And while it may look like quite a big investment from the get-go, Sony has kept on top of keeping the product up to date. While the initial product was released three years ago, Sony has now released motion detection software for the Mocopi, showing they’re still putting in the effort.
At the end of the day, this isn’t going to instantly replace your controller. But it does make you rethink it. Because there’s nothing like moving your body IRL, and watching your in-game avatar do exactly the same thing.
