OptiTrack is now shipping its Insight VCS virtual camera system, which was introduced at the 2010 SIGGRAPH conference this summer. The Insight VCS is affordably priced and ideal for a variety of previsualization and production applications that require sophisticated computer graphics or real-world camera work into virtual productions.
The Insight VCS has been adopted by a number of previsualization, film production and video game development companies, such as Nvizage, USC School of Cinematic Arts, Monolith Productions, Halon Entertainment, Animatrik Film Design and Spark Unlimited.
Sold as a two-part system, the Insight VCS consists of a hardware camera rig and software interface. As the hardware rig is tracked throughout the motion capture volume, absolute 6 DOF position and orientation data is streamed live via software plug-in, to either Autodesk MotionBuilder or Maya, to drive the virtual camera within the 3-D application. Real-time reference video is streamed out of the MotionBuilder or Maya application back to the VCS display, creating a low-latency visual feedback loop, similar to the viewfinder of a digital camera.
To ensure compatibility with a variety of production workflows, the Insight VCS has a universal option for interoperability with any existing optical motion capture system — including OptiTrack, Vicon and Motion Analysis — that can track marker-based rigid bodies and stream data to Autodesk MotionBuilder.
