QUANTIC DREAM OF MOTION CAPTURE

"There is simply no alternative system out there today if your objective is to obtain the highest possible quality" - Guillaume de Fondaumière, Co-CEO at Quantic Dream

20 November 2007, Oxford UK: Vicon, developer of Academy Award-winning motion capture systems, today announced that Quantic Dream has bought the latest Vicon F-Series system, which will help further increase the level of quality in its studio. The new system gives Quantic a real edge to create spectacularly realistic virtual actors.

The new F-Series from Vicon is today’s most powerful, accurate and versatile system on the market. Its enhanced accuracy gives Quantic the ability to not only capture body movements with stunning realism, but also capture the facial expressions of actors. Blade, the software that comes with the new system, is more powerful and now capable of much faster post-processing capture data, increasing studio productivity. It also allows Quantic to capture more characters, set elements and props than was possible with its previous systems.

Guillaume de Fondaumière, Co-CEO at Quantic Dream describes the importance of motion capture technology to the studio: “Our objective is to make this media a mainstream entertainment form with high creative expectations. To do so, we have invented our own format called “Interactive Cinema” in which realistic, believable characters play a central role. To us, the only way to reach the level of quality we were targeting for the animation of our characters was to use Vicon motion capture.”

He continued: “We needed a system that could be used with ambient light, as it is less tiresome for the actors who sometimes spend days and days in our studio. High speed (for more accurate capture of fast movements) and high resolution, in particular for the facial motion capture, were also very important. The F-Series cameras are the only cameras that offer all of these attributes within the same system. There is simply no alternative system out there today if your objective is to obtain the highest possible quality.”

Quantic Dream purchased the Vicon system to work on a new internal project, which has yet to be named. It is currently in production, in partnership with Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation 3. This project alone will require some four months worth of capture.

Requests to use the new studio have been flooding in. Fondaumière explains: “Demand has been immediate and we have actually already started to rent the system to high-profile video game and advertising clients. Our new studio is fully installed and is functioning almost every day either for complex full body or facial captures.”

Nick Bolton, chief executive at Oxford Metrics, parent company of Vicon says: “I’m delighted Quantic Dream has had such a great response to its new system from Vicon. The F40 cameras are part of the award winning MX range, which emphases our continual commitment to improving quality and pushing the industry forward.”

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 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 Yotta DCL.

Oxford Metrics’ 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.yotta.tv, www.vicon.com, or www.2d3.com.

About Quantic Dream
QUANTIC DREAM was founded in 1997 in Paris, France. Since its creation, the studio has gained international recognition for its contribution to interactive narration and its fresh thinking on emotion in games.

The video game studio collaborated in the past with major publishers including Eidos, Vivendi, Microsoft and Atari. We created games like OMIKRON-THE NOMAD SOUL featuring recording artist David Bowie and more recently, FAHRENHEIT (INDIGO PROPHECY in North America). The latter was one of the most awarded games of 2005 and was praised for its originality and innovation. Quantic Dream recently announced a partnership with Sony Computer Entertainment WWS on the development of a PS3 exclusive game.

Today, Quantic Dream boasts a unique infrastructure adapted to next generation development, including a large Motion Capture set coupled with a state of the art 3D scanner allowing us to create true Virtual Actors. Over the last ten years the studio has developed proprietary technologies, including some very advanced tools and a unique approach to the production pipeline.

More information about Quantic Dream at http://www.quanticdream.com
Virtual Actor Studio Contact email: fbarkoff@quanticdream.com