Welcome to the 2024 edition of the Standard

This is an important year for Vicon, and I’m thrilled to be sharing it with you, our community.

On a personal note, it’s been a privilege to add the CEO role of Vicon’s parent company, Oxford Metrics plc, to my duties here at Vicon. As a group, we’ve recorded record revenue (up 53.5 percent year-on-year) driven largely by the continued excellence of Vicon, and made a major step into the world of industrial smart sensing with the acquisition of Industrial Vision Systems.

2024 also brings Vicon to its 40th birthday. Most technology companies don’t like to talk about their age, but we’re not most technology companies. We’ve spent 40 years leading the field of motion capture, and we’re incredibly proud of that heritage. It’s the institutional expertise gained over those four decades that makes us the innovative organization that we are today, and it’s that pedigree that gives our users trust in Vicon solutions. Being pioneering is in our DNA. It has been for four decades.

But while a strong, dynamic Vicon is good for our community, the most important business at hand is the work we’re doing to expand the possibilities of motion capture.

We’re certainly in a pivotal moment on that front.

We’ve been investing heavily in markerless tracking so that, when it becomes an integral part of our motion capture ecosystem, Vicon users will have a solution they know they can trust. We offered a first glimpse of that technology at SIGGRAPH and it couldn’t have resonated more powerfully with the delegates there.

At this point in our markerless development cycle, we’re extremely focused on accessibility and reliability. That’s why we took the opportunity presented by our SIGGRAPH showcase to launch the Pioneer Program; that’s why we’ve partnered with famous clients such as Industrial Light & Magic and Dreamscape as Cornerstone Customers; and that’s why we will soon be launching our markerless beta program.

Markerless has an important place in the multi-modal future of motion capture, and we intend to set the standard—just as we do in optical. But we understand that strong products come from understanding the wants and needs of our community, which is why it’s so important to us to include you in the development of this innovative new technology.  

Beyond markerless, the launches of Nexus 2.15, Shōgun 1.11, Tracker 4.0 and Evoke 1.6 mean our flagship Valkyrie camera range is now integrated into the pipelines of every industry that we serve. Other features, such as Shōgun 1.11’s introduction of graphs and calibration scaling and Tracker 4.0’s System Health Reports and System Healing functionality, serve to diversify the way users can access their data and streamline their workflows.

Our headline when it comes to how our customers access their data, though, is the launch of Nexus Insight. It will ultimately replace Polygon as our main reporting tool for the life sciences with clean, modern presentation and an intuitive user interface. We believe it will not only offer users a powerful new tool for the interpretation of their data, but also open up new opportunities for involving patients and other subjects in their analysis.

None of the above means much without our customers taking our technology and using it to deliver great work. This issue of The Standard is once again packed with the real-world application of Vicon technology across the life sciences, entertainment and engineering. We have stories of our technology empowering Native creators in Canada, helping with the design of insect-sized nano-drones, enabling an innovative crossover between biomechanics and game design and much, much more.

One of the most inspiring aspects of my role is seeing our customers pick up our technology and run, dance, fly, or capture some other movement we couldn’t possibly have imagined with it. So, thank you to you, our customers, partners, distributors and everyone else who makes the work we do meaningful. And thank you, of course, to the staff who make Vicon such an exceptional organization.

Our company is 40 this year. I look forward to the future of Vicon with excitement and optimism. I’m grateful to you for being part of that story.