That $2000 price was for hardware which I have no control of.  That was about how much it costed when I setup my system.  I got everything brand new(tripods, USB 2.0 hubs, 15ft cables etc), obviously you don't need to pay for those if you already have them.  Also full body capture might work with 4 cameras, that will save another $500, but it will be less accurate, there will be more occlusions and markers will need to be manually identified more often.

I originally started this project when I was working on making a fight video game and manually creating motions was so tedious, it drove me almost crazy.  Even if nothing good comes out of this project, I will at least be able to continue my video game development ;-)