Rigid body overview

Most people are familiar with the concept of tracking objects in 3D, which is when an object’s position in space is measured with X, Y, and Z coordinates. Your Qualisys system allows you to go beyond this and track rigid bodies with six degrees of freedom (6DoF). In 6DoF tracking, your Qualisys system records not only the object’s position as it moves translationally (left/right, up/down, and forward/backward) but also its rotational axes (yaw, pitch, and roll).

The advantage to tracking six degrees of freedom rather than just three is that you can record the pose of an object, not only its location. Recording rigid bodies with your Qualisys system also allows you to track virtual points that don’t have physical markers attached (for example, the center point between two markers).

Another feature of tracking rigid bodies with your Qualisys system is redundancy. As long as you use more than three markers to track an object, you will still get complete data even if one of the markers becomes blocked from the cameras’ view.