Big news at Artanim: 24 powerful Vicon Valkyrie VK26 cameras have just landed in our studio!
After more than 15 years of loyal service, it was time to replace our faithful Vicon T40S. Moving from 4MP to an impressive 26.2MP, these new cameras represent a major leap forward for our motion capture capabilities.
Thanks to their higher resolution and larger field of view, we can now expand our capture volume while significantly improving the quality, precision and fidelity of the motion capture data we record. We can’t wait to see the next generation of performances, movements and immersive experiences captured with this system.
And that’s not all.
We have also installed 22 markerless motion capture cameras, allowing us to capture several actors in real time, in the same 11m x 5.5m capture space, with virtually zero setup time.
No Velcro suits. No markers. No tedious range of motion calibration. Just step into the volume and start moving.
While markerless capture is not yet as accurate as marker-based systems, it already opens exciting new opportunities for fast previsualization, prototyping, interactive installations and immersive experiences.
Want to discover how our upgraded studio looks?
Take an immersive 3D Gaussian splatting tour here.
Looking back at a unique capture session we conducted in 2024 for Being Laser – Restless Limbs, an experimental video project by Swiss visual artist Alan Bogana. While motion capture is often associated with controlled studio environments, some projects require us to step far outside these conditions. For this production, two performers were recorded inside a vertical wind tunnel, where a powerful upward airflow allowed them to perform complex body-flight movements. This raised several technical challenges:
How do inertial sensors behave in a high-speed airflow environment?
How do you ensure accurate body tracking when performers continuously rotate and move in three dimensions?
How do you maintain performer comfort and data quality while wearing a motion capture suit in free flight?
To address these challenges, the two performers flew while wearing Xsens inertial motion capture suits, enabling full-body motion capture in conditions far removed from a traditional studio setup. Careful preparation and close collaboration with the production team helped ensure reliable tracking throughout the capture sessions. The resulting motion data contributed to the creation of the digital characters featured in Being Laser – Restless Limbs, demonstrating how motion capture can support artistic projects even in highly unconventional settings. At Artanim, we enjoy exploring the limits of motion capture technology and finding ways to bring movement into the digital world, wherever it happens. More info about the project here.
Attention and Curiosity play a key role in the guidance of behavior and skill acquisition. But how do you measure these processes, and how do they come together in a learning context? Can the controlled environment that VR enables play a role here? And what are the exact parameters for efficient learning? These sorts of questions are what ABC-Space is all about. This SNSF-supported project which runs from 2024 to 2028, combines the expertise of LABNIC, TECFA and Artanim to try and find answers by exploring these concepts in three building blocks:
Attention in 3D Space – how do we obtain reliable indices of attention in VR and a refined understanding of the underlying cognitive mechanisms?
Curiosity in Naturalistic Environments – how do we measure how curiosity drives behavior and determine how it may boost or hamper memory in VR?
Virtual social interaction through physics-based characters – how do more physically interactive characters offer a benefit to educational VR scenarios, and to what extent do their social cues affect spatial attention?
At Artanim, we focus on the development of physics-based controllers to control virtual reality characters and contribute to the design of behavioural experiments to validate their impact in terms of attention and learning. We further leverage our production expertise to create the VR environments and the characters within them to support the various studies.
We are proud to announce that Artanim has been selected by Cinzia Fossati (writer-director) and Laurence Moletta (writer-composer) to lead the Phase 1 R&D of Symphony of the Deep.
Today also marks an important milestone for the project, as we held our first review session with Cinzia — a moment we are glad to share through these first test pictures.
Conceived as a multi-user interactive XR experience, Symphony of the Deep invites participants to step into the world of sperm whales through a sensory journey shaped by sound, movement, and collective presence.
At the heart of the experience lies a clear environmental intention: to raise awareness of underwater noise pollution and human impact on marine ecosystems, by inviting participants to perceive the ocean through the sensory world of sperm whales.
At the core of this first R&D phase, Artanim is developing a multi-user VR prototype focused on two central challenges: embodied swimming techniques for collective locomotion, and real-time vocal echolocation as a shared mode of perception. Using their own voices, participants generate acoustic and visual echoes that gradually reveal the underwater environment, turning sound into navigation, interaction, and storytelling.
We are thrilled to bring our expertise to this singular and ambitious project, and excited to help shape the first movements of this immersive symphony.
This project is support by Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC), Migros Storylab, Cinéforom, Ville de Genève, and Etat de Genève, and is accompanied by LaetitiaBochud and VirtualSwitzerland.
More to come soon…
To learn more about the project and follow its development, visit AVRIL or the project page.
We are excited to share an important milestone for MoRehab XR: we have just completed the feasibility study with 15 patients.
MoRehab XR is a project developed by Artanim in collaboration with Hôpital de La Tour, exploring how motion tracking and virtual reality (VR) can make shoulder rehabilitation more engaging, motivating, and measurable.
In this pilot study, patients undergoing rehabilitation after a Latarjet procedure, frozen shoulder, or rotator cuff repair participated in a series of gamified VR rehabilitation sessions. The results are very encouraging: all participants successfully completed the protocol, reported very low discomfort and perceived risk, and showed high interest and good perceived competence throughout the experience.
These first results support the feasibility, safety, and user acceptance of our current setup, and strengthen our motivation to move toward larger clinical validation studies.
A big thank you to everyone involved in this project — the clinical team (Alexandre Lädermann, Antoine Seurot, Hugo Bothorel), researchers, developers, artists, and of course the patients who took part in the study.
