Acquisition adds markerless facial capture to Vicon’s industry-leading motion capture ecosystem built on four decades of innovation
OXFORD, UK – 1 September 2026 – Vicon, the motion capture division of Oxford Metrics plc (LSE: OMG), announced today it has acquired Captive Devices Ltd, the Manchester, UK-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 globally by studios including Ninja Theory, Nant Studios, Animatrik and Deep Silver Dambuster Studios, Captive Devices’ technology bolsters Vicon’s extensive motion capture offerings, which have been trusted worldwide for accuracy, innovation and performance for more than 40 years. The acquisition pairs Captive Devices’ markerless facial capture with Vicon’s enterprise-grade body tracking – making Vicon the only vendor building and supporting both systems in-house.
Optical, marker-based motion capture remains core to Vicon’s business. The company’s hybrid approach allows customers to adopt markerless capability alongside the systems they already use and trust. This transaction extends what that combined offer can achieve.
“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’ professional-grade 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. This means studios can start using it inside their current pipelines right away.
“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.
About Captive Devices
Captive Devices builds professional facial performance capture hardware for games, film and immersive entertainment. Its CoreHMC stereo head-mounted systems deliver high-fidelity facial data into Unreal Engine, MetaHuman Animator and other production pipelines, and are used worldwide by studios including Ninja Theory, Nant Studios, Animatrik and Deep Silver Dambuster Studios.