We propose a new method for activity recognition based on a view independent representation of human motion. Robust 3D volume motion templates (VMTs) are calculated from tracklets. View independence is achieved through a rotation with respect to a canonical orientation. From this volumes, features based on 3D gradients are extracted, projected to a codebook and pooled into a bags-of-words model classified with an SVM classifier. Experiments show that the method outperforms the original HoG3D method.