Vicon

A British optical motion-capture company, a common source of ground-truth pose in robotics labs.

Vicon is a British optical motion-capture company based in Oxford, part of the listed company Oxford Metrics. The first Vicon product launched in 1979 out of a subsidiary of Oxford Instruments, becoming independent after a 1984 management buyout. Its systems surround a capture area with multiple infrared cameras that track reflective markers attached to a person or object, computing millimeter-accurate 3D position and orientation in real time. Beyond film animation and sports biomechanics, robotics labs commonly use it to supply external ground-truth pose for quadrupeds, drones, and robot arms — for evaluating state-estimation error — or to record human motion that is later retargeted onto humanoid robots. It competes directly with OptiTrack and is generally priced higher.

ExampleWhen training a quadruped to run, researchers record the body's true position with Vicon and compare it against the robot's own estimated odometry to see how much it has drifted.

Also called

Vicon Motion Systems

Related

Optical Motion Capture · Motion Capture · OptiTrack · Motion Retargeting · State Estimation · Ground Truth

Sources

Vicon: About Us
Vicon: What Is Motion Capture

As of

2026-09