Matt Oughton is the EMEA sales manager for Vicon and talks about the Vicon motion capture system that they were demonstrating at the IEEE VR conference. Vicon has been in the motion capture business since 1984, and he talks about some of the specifications and use cases for their system. Vicon cameras are used for Virtual Reality tracking, movies and gaming entertainment as well as in the life sciences and engineering applications and industry design reviews.
He talks about some of the different high-precision systems that can track up to 150,000 markers and a refresh rate that can go up to 2000 Hz. Most of the Vicon camera systems for virtual reality would range from 30 to 250Hz and be able to track up to 50 objects or around 200 individual markers.
The price of their solutions can range as low as 5000 pounds and over a million pounds, and when I asked Matt whether Vicon is considering getting into the consumer market and he said that they’re primarily focused on the high-end and high-precision applications. After hearing about the upper range of some of the specifications for what their systems are able to do in a wireless fashion, then it seems like they’ll continue to serve the needs of their industry customers. However, Matt says that the lowering cost of technology is really unpredictable and so it’s difficult to predict how the technology in the space will continue to evolve. So it’s yet to be seen whether or not Vicon will be disrupted by some of the other consumer-grade motion capture systems that are emerging.
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
