Vicon has acquired Captive Devices Ltd, a Manchester, U.K.-based maker of head-mounted camera systems for markerless facial performance capture. Vicon is the motion capture arm of Oxford Metrics. The founding team at Captive Devices has joined Vicon effective immediately.
Ninja Theory, Nant Studios, Animatrik and Deep Silver Dambuster Studios are among the studios that already rely on Captive Devices’ hardware and software to capture facial performance for visual effects, games and virtual production. Folding that technology into Vicon’s existing body-tracking systems gives the company an in-house offering that spans both facial and body capture, something it says no other vendor in the space currently provides. Vicon’s marker-based optical motion capture, the core of its business for more than 40 years, remains unchanged.
The company frames the acquisition as an addition rather than a replacement, allowing customers to layer markerless facial capture onto the systems they already run. Now it’s one system, one team and one support line.” The CoreHMC system built by Captive Devices plugs directly into Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, letting performers and crews capture, review and tweak facial performance in real time on set. That integration means studios already working in Unreal Engine pipelines can begin using the technology without a transition period.
Fred Isaac, co-founder of Captive Devices, said the deal extends the reach of that hardware. Now we’re joining a team who’s spent decades building trust with exactly the studios we want to reach.” O’Connor described the acquisition as part of a broader investment strategy at Vicon. Vicon was founded in 1984 and builds motion capture systems for use in life sciences, entertainment, location-based virtual reality and engineering.
Its client list spans Dreamworks, Byte Dance, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, Industrial Light and Magic, Lux Machina, Pearl Abyss, Sony, Ubisoft and Warner Bros. Oxford Metrics, its parent company, serves thousands of customers across more than 70 countries.
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