OMG plc, United Kingdom

OMG plc owns Vicon Motion Systems, the world’s leading motion capture system vendor. The Vicon system measures the 3D position of spherical retro-reflective markers to a high accuracy. Vicon currently sells the MX+ series of motion capture cameras. This range includes the MX40+, which is a 4 Megapixel camera that can operate at up to 370 frames per second. This is the 6th generation of camera developed by Vicon and has 3 onboard processors dedicated to processing the data from the imaging sensor.
The MX system permits up to 56 cameras to be connected to a single control PC. This enables the accurate measurement of hundreds of markers in real time. Using advanced software the identity of the markers can be recovered and used to compute the movement of a human subject.
There are hundreds of Vicon customers all over the world and these customers use Vicon system to measure a wide range of human and animal motion. Animals measured include pigeons, horses and elephants. The most common measurement made on humans is whole body movement (excluding face and hands). It is now well within MX capabilities to measure combined face, body and hand data on multiple subjects!
Many elements of this technology are mature, but there remain huge challenges to be overcome. Only one application has really been systematised within a user group – the clinical gait community took up motion capture some 10 years ago and built up a set of protocols and procedures that set a standard for that community. In most other cases users export data at a specific point in the pipeline and use a mixture of other tools to process the data from there on.

  Team leader

Andrew Stoddart

  Main tasks

	synchronised multimodal data acquisition
	motion capture of hands and objects
	subject calibration of the hand
	skeletal modelling of the hand and marker set design
	data fusion of sensory data and motion capture data
	natural motion representation

Contact OMG
Dr. Andrew Stoddart
OMG plc
14 Minns Business Park, West way, OX2
0JB Oxford, UK
E-mail