VANCOUVER — At the SIGGRAPH show this week, Vicon (www.vicon.com) showed off Origin, a comprehensive location-based virtual reality (LBVR) system that blends the company’s Academy Award-winning tracking abilities with tools that make it easy for anyone to setup and operate. Building on nearly 35 years of R&D, Vicon’s new, fully-scalable solution is designed to empower VR creators big and small by offering high quality and reliability.
Origin includes three brand new pieces of 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 tseveral components. Viper is a compact, lightweight tracking camera specifically designed to work with active marker technology. Pulsar are wearable tracking clusters that emit unique, active infrared LED patterns synchronized to ensure optimal battery life. They are 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 is a highly automated software platform featuring unbreakable tracking and auto-healing between sessions.
With Origin, multiple participants can appear simultaneously as characters in the LBVR environment, each with fully animated avatars driven by Evoke’s realtime 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,” says 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.”