SONY COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT OF AMERICA INC. MORE THAN DOUBLES MOTION CAPTURE OUTPUT WITH VICON MX40 SYSTEM

Dramatic Productivity Gains in Motion Capture for Games Credited to Vicon's Infinitely Scalable, Highly-Accurate 4-Million Pixel MX Camera-Based System and Diva Pipeline Software.

Oxford, UK (March 15, 2005)-Vicon Motion Systems announced today that Sony Computer Entertainment of America Inc. (SCEA) has more than doubled its motion capture output as a result of deploying Vicon's MX40 system. SCEA Motion Capture operates as a service bureau available to all of Sony's first-party game titles that require motion capture. The outfit installed a 24-camera Vicon MX40 system in September of 2004, and in just six months has already exceeded the amount of motion capture produced in all of the previous year.

" We simply would not have been able to keep up with the volume of work that we had scheduled these past few months without the Vicon MX40 system," commented Brian Rausch, Department Manager, SCEA Motion Capture. "In January alone we delivered over 5280 motions-many of which were multiple character performances resulting in a total of over 9,000 individual character animations. Many of these have involved very complex captures including a 7-man dog-pile and an 8-man cinematic sequence. These types of shots and level of output would have been unfathomable with any other system."

As aggressive as SCEA has been with the system, they plan to accomplish even more complex capture scenarios this coming year. Many of the challenging production demands placed upon Rausch and his team are determined by the latest graphics capabilities of next generation Sony consoles. In the next 12 months it is anticipated that 75% of SCEA's work will involve hand capture of performers simultaneous with full body capture. To accommodate these more complex demands, SCEA is currently building a new studio with a dedicated 121 foot X 124 foot X 35 foot high capture stage. The studio primarily completes capture for action adventure and for sports games-the sports genre comprises approximately 50% of what they'll capture in a given year.

When asked why SCEA chose to standardize its pipeline on Vicon technologies, Rausch replied, "The main reason we chose Vicon is the unparalleled combination of great technology and great support. The people at Vicon are amazing-it is one of the few companies where the sales representatives are also actually engineers who understand the underpinnings of the technology and how it works. Another bonus is that since Vicon acquired House of Moves, technology development of their Diva Software is even more tightly integrated with Vicon's systems than ever before. Considering that Diva is the main software backbone to SCEA's mo-cap pipeline, this has been very beneficial to us.

The SCEA Motion Capture pipeline typically involves capturing performance data using their 24-camera MX40 Vicon system, acquiring and labeling the data in the Vicon iQ intelligent processing software, then passing it through to Diva Pipeline Software for filtering, gap filling and exporting into Alias' MotionBuilder where data is retargeted to CG characters and delivered as such to their customers. This process has become significantly streamlined with the MX40 cameras, as the high-quality data coming through requires almost no manual tweaking.

About Vicon MX Systems
Vicon motion capture systems provide ultra-high-resolution, virtually artifact-free capture with MX40, the world's first four-million-pixel motion capture camera. The Vicon MX line revolutionizes the quality, flexibility and ease with which motion capture data can be applied to both real-time and off-line applications with high frame rates, on-camera proprietary real-time image processing, real-time output and simultaneous capture for facial, hand, foot and body performance. Vicon MX has replaced the VICON 8 and MCam2s as the new benchmark for the industry standard for precision, range, fidelity and marker density. More than 500 Vicon MX cameras have already been installed around the world since the cameras were launched in June 2004.

About Diva
Diva, developed by Vicon subsidiary House of Moves is a powerful and extensible motion capture editing software. Trajectory editing tools, non-linear editing of takes, scriptable operations, import and export filters, mesh deformation and skeletal solving are all features built into Diva specifically for editing motion capture data. Diva has been conceived, designed and developed by House of Moves specifically to meet the incredibly challenging demands of today's motion capture customers. These demands push the limits of the technology, and Diva contains the toolsets required to wrangle even the most difficult datasets.

About VICON
VICON Motion Systems is a subsidiary of OMG plc (LSE: OMG) with global headquarters in Oxford, UK, and US headquarters in Lake Forest, CA. OMG subsidiary 2d3 Ltd. produces innovative visual geometry software deriving 3D data from moving images. Since 1984, VICON has been providing professionals with the latest tools to accurately capture the subtleties of three-dimensional human motion for research, medicine, sport, engineering, game development, broadcast and film. For more information about VICON, or to view a comprehensive list of worldwide distributors, visit www.vicon.com or contact +44 (0) 1865-261800 in the UK or (949) 472-9140 in the US.

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VICON, VICON MX, MCam, VICON 8 and VICON iQ are trademarks of OMG plc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.