VICON’S FK EXTREME MOTION CAPTURE SYSTEM WIDELY ADOPTED BY ENTERTAINMENT AND EDUCATION FACILITIES

New Affordable System Delivers Ease-of-Use with VICON’s Signature
Quality, Accuracy and Reliability

Los Angeles, CA (January 22, 2008)—VICON, developer of Academy Award®-winning motion capture systems, today announced that its low-cost motion capture system, FK Extreme, has been gaining momentum with continually growing system sales to both entertainment and educational facilities located around the globe. FK Extreme was first introduced at the Game Developer’s Conference in March 2007, and is based on the same VICON motion capture technology in place at leading animation studios and gaming facilities worldwide.

"As an existing VICON customer with a 48 camera MX40 motion capture solution, the decision to add an additional FKExtreme system was easy," said Matt Karnes, Motion Capture Coordinator, Activision. "We use the FKExtreme for facial animation alongside our full body system and despite its entry-level price point, it puts out really high quality performance data."

Widescreen Games, a French independent games studio recently installed an FK Extreme system. "Having been in the industry since 1997, I can remember the days when high quality motion capture was prohibitively expensive. With the FK Extreme system, those days are gone; I was surprised by how easy it is to set up and work with, yielding fantastic results from the very first day of shooting," said Christophe Leulier, Animation Technical Director at Widescreen Games.
The latest facilities to adopt VICON’s FK Extreme include Venice, Calif.-based animation and pre-visualization studio Pixel Liberation Front, 3D animation studio Hydrogen Whiskey located in Santa Monica. Calif., France’s Widescreen Games, Newport Beach-based gaming facility InXile Entertainment, and Another Dimension, located in the UK.

Validating its position as the predominant provider of in-house motion capture systems, numerous educational facilities have also installed VICON’s FK Extreme, including the Art Institute of California (Santa Ana, CA), the New York Institute of Technology (New York, NY), Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), the University of California, Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA), University at Buffalo (Buffalo, NY), Fanshawe College (Ontario, Canada), Orlando Tech (Orlando, FL), the John Deere Southeast Engineering Center (Charlotte, NC), Vizeon (Albuquerque, NM), Clemson University (Clemson, South Carolina), the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, GA), Confederation College (Ontario, Canada), Platt College (San Diego, CA), the University of Michigan, Oregon State University (Corvallis, OR) and the University of Technology, Sydney (Sydney, Australia).

“We’re delighted that such a wide array of customers are realizing the benefits of bringing high quality motion capture capabilities in-house,” commented Robin Pengelly, Senior Vice President, Entertainment Division. “FK Extreme delivers a highly accurate motion capture solution in a very practical, low profile and cost-effective package, so it’s extremely rewarding to see so many facilities incorporating it into their animation and training pipelines.”

With an extensive amount of new camera engineering and a simplified, user-friendly software interface, FK Extreme delivers incredible price performance in a setup comprised of VICON’s MX3+ cameras, new processing software and a full customer support package. The software component contains all of the underlying power of VICON’s robust architecture in a new graphical user interface (GUI) that takes the user step-by-step through the process of running a motion capture system, yet can still be easily customized by experienced users who want to design their own specific interface and workflow.

The FK Extreme system is ideally suited to small to mid-sized game development and animation facilities and is great for capturing both in-game motions and cinematic sequences with up to two performers. The benefits of the latest VICON system are that while incredibly powerful, it is also fully extensible for facilities that aim to expand into multiple performer capture sessions with high degrees of interaction between characters.

About VICON
Academy Award®-winning VICON is the world’s largest supplier of precision motion tracking systems, serving customers and CG animation applications in film, visual effects, computer games, and broadcast television, as well as engineering and life science industries. VICON operates in four offices worldwide, including its Los Angeles-based Entertainment headquarters, a 26,000 square-foot facility equipped with three performance capture stages for VICON’s service company House of Moves as well as 125 VICON MX40 cameras.

VICON is the largest holding of OMG (Oxford Metrics Group - LSE: OMG), plc., a group of technology companies that produces image understanding solutions for the entertainment, defense, life science and engineering markets. Other holdings include Emmy Award®-winning 2d3 and newly founded Geospatial Vision Ltd.

VICON’s and OMG’s global clients include: life science leaders University of Pennsylvania, the VA Hospitals, Shriners Hospitals for Children, Titleist Golf, National Pitching Association; engineering industry leaders Ford, BMW, Airbus, Lockheed, Pratt-Whitney, NASA, Caterpillar, International Truck, and Toyota; and entertainment companies Sony Pictures Imageworks, Sony Computer Entertainment, Industrial Light and Magic, Sega, Nintendo, Ubisoft, Vivendi, Electronic Arts, Square Enix and many others. For more information about OMG and its subsidiaries, visit www.omg3d.com, www.vicon.com, or www.2d3.com.

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VICON and VICON MX are trademarks of OMG plc. Academy Award is a trade or servicemark of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.