Today, Vicon announces the release of “Origin,” a comprehensive location-based virtual reality (LBVR) system that blends Vicon’s unmatched, Academy Award-winning tracking abilities with tools that make it easy for anyone to setup and operate. Building on nearly 35 years of industry-leading R&D that’s made it the leader in engineering, healthcare and motion capture for blockbuster films, Vicon’s new fully scalable solution is designed to empower VR creators big and small by offering unparalleled quality and reliability.
“The location-based VR industry is poised to explode, but for fans and developers to really embrace it, the experience needs to be flawless,” said Dreamscape Immersive co-founder and CTO Caecilia Charbonnier. “When Vicon first approached us about working with them on Origin we demanded the highest level of precision, and Vicon did not disappoint.”
Origin includes three brand new pieces of innovative hardware, along with software created specifically for Vicon’s new LBVR system, all curated to meet current and future market demands. Following three years of development working alongside creators like Dreamscape Immersive, Origin contains everything a commercial enterprise would need to drive a fully immersive experience. Auto-healing software capable of repairing calibrations between sessions, paired with tracking that never fails also ensures that the system requires minimal training and maintenance in order to operate perfectly every time.
The Origin suite consists of the following:
- Viper – A compact, lightweight tracking camera specifically designed to work with active marker technology.
- Pulsar – Wearable tracking clusters that emit unique, active infrared LED patterns synchronized to ensure optimal battery life, designed to easily attach to a participant’s body, limbs and head-mounted displays.
- Beacon – Creates a synchronized wireless network connecting to Pulsar clusters (or other devices), allowing them to communicate with Viper cameras and provide seamless connectivity.
- Evoke – A highly automated software platform featuring unbreakable tracking and auto-healing between sessions; a fully featured API, seamless game engine integration and the ability to run Evoke entirely in the background result in a flawless capture experience that anyone can operate.
With Origin, multiple participants can appear simultaneously as characters in the LBVR environment, each with fully animated avatars driven by Evoke’s real-time tracking. Participants wear the Pulsar clusters on their body, limbs and head-mounted displays, contributing to creating a fully immersive experience where their every movement is recreated in the virtual world. Participants can also interact with others and react to them based on their movements. Tools and props can utilize clusters as well, allowing them to be passed between participants to increase the immersion.
“We have decades of experience creating the most precise and robust optical motion capture systems in the world, so the expansion into LBVR was natural,” said Vicon CEO Imogen Moorhouse. “Origin has been perfected over the last few years, built upon the foundation of our proven solutions, and designed to meet the current and future needs of this exciting industry.”
Origin will be on display at SIGGRAPH 2018, August 14-16, as part of Vicon’s booth presentation. Attendees can stop by booth #1239 and see the system in action thanks to an interactive demo created and showcased by Dreamscape Immersive. Demos will run from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. PDT.
