Vicon acquires Captive Devices

The motion capture division of Oxford Metrics, Vicon, has acquired Captive Devices Ltd, the Manchester-based designer of head-mounted camera systems and software that helps enable markerless facial performance capture used in visual effects, games and virtual production.

Captive Devices’ founding team has joined Vicon, effective immediately.

Used by studios including Ninja Theory, Nant Studios, Animatrik and Deep Silver Dambuster Studios, Captive Devices’ technology bolsters Vicon’s motion capture offerings. The acquisition pairs Captive Devices’ markerless facial capture with Vicon’s body tracking – “making Vicon the only vendor building and supporting both systems in-house.”

“This acquisition is a natural fit for Vicon and Captive Devices, culturally and technologically,” said Imogen O’Connor, CEO of Oxford Metrics, Vicon’s parent company. “Vicon can now offer customers a more integrated, end-to-end body and face capture workflow that enables them to capture, analyze and animate human performance with even greater efficiency than before.”

“This pairing closes a real gap for studios in film, games and virtual production,” said David “Ed” Edwards, Product Lead for Entertainment and Hardware at Vicon. “Body and facial performance capture have always come from separate vendors with separate pipelines. Now it’s one system, one team and one support line.”

Captive Devices’ system integrates directly with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, enabling performers, studios and production teams to capture, review and iterate facial performance within real-time production environments.

“Joining Vicon gives us the manufacturing scale, sales distribution and global support network to put CoreHMC in front of far more studios than we could reach alone,” said Fred Isaac, co-founder, Captive Devices. “The technology, the team and the way we serve customers remains the same. Now we’re joining a team who’s spent decades building trust with exactly the studios we want to reach.”

“These are exactly the kind of targeted investments we want to make in Vicon – adding differentiated technology and specialist expertise in areas that build seamlessly onto our existing strengths,” O’Connor added.