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PhaseSpace

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PhaseSpace
Information
Type Private
Industry Motion capture, optical tracking
Founded 1994
Founder Tracy McSheery
Headquarters San Leandro, California, United States
Notable Personnel Tracy McSheery
Products Impulse X2E motion capture system
Website https://www.phasespace.com


PhaseSpace (PhaseSpace Inc.) is an American maker of optical motion capture systems that track active LED markers instead of passive reflective ones. The company was founded in 1994 and is based in San Leandro, California. It was founded by Tracy McSheery, whom company materials describe as its CEO.[1][2][3] Each PhaseSpace marker modulates its own unique code, which Road to VR said eliminates the common motion capture problem of marker swapping.[4] Its current product is the Impulse X2E system.[3]

PhaseSpace trackers have been used in virtual reality research and production since at least 2010. They tracked users' shins in a University of North Carolina walking-in-place system, tracked the head-mounted display in Nonny de la Peña's Hunger in LA (2012), and later supported free-roam, multi-user VR demos built on Samsung Gear VR headsets.[5][6][4]

Reviewed 21 October 2026. Checked every claim against the cited company pages, press releases, Road to VR, Electronic Design, NVIDIA/Inknowvation, the patent record, SIGGRAPH archive, IEEE VR 2017 exhibitor list and the full texts of the Wendt dissertation, Virtual Headcam poster and both OpenAI papers. About review dates.

History

Founding and early technology

A 2010 company press release said PhaseSpace was founded in 1994 and claimed it was the first company to introduce advanced motion capture technologies at an affordable price point. It described the company as privately held and based in San Francisco, and its technology as a combination of custom optics, "Smart Active LED markers" with unique digital IDs and digital signal processing for real-time capture.[1] The company's archived "About" page also gives 1994 as the founding year and describes it as a Bay Area company working on motion capture and motion tracking.[7] Its current site says it has pioneered active LED motion capture since 1998, that it was founded in San Leandro, and that it designs, builds and tests its systems in-house at its San Leandro headquarters.[8]

McSheery holds a 1981 mechanical engineering degree from UC Berkeley and a 1993 master's degree in applied physics from UC Davis, and served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy. According to the company, he designed and delivered optical position tracking systems at PhaseSpace for computer animation, telepresence, sports medicine and virtual training.[2] He is the first-named inventor on US patent 6,324,296, "Distributed-processing motion tracking system for tracking individually modulated light points", filed on 4 December 1997 and granted on 27 November 2001 with PhaseSpace as assignee.[9]

Film and SIGGRAPH work

McSheery has presented PhaseSpace work at SIGGRAPH since at least 2006, when he and Charles Luther ran a "Motion Capture Area" in the conference's Studio.[10] PhaseSpace returned to The Studio at SIGGRAPH 2010, where it provided motion capture, its Magic Window virtual camera, actors and computing resources for attendee sessions.[1] At SIGGRAPH 2011 it announced IMPROV, a system starting at US$19,950 with eight 3600x3600-resolution cameras and an HP Z210 workstation; Glove Box, an IMPROV add-on for real-time capture of gestures and finger motion; and Magic Window, a real-time virtual camera that used an HP Slate 500 with the Impulse and IMPROV systems to preview camera moves inside a MotionBuilder scene.[11]

Electronic Design reported in 2012 that PhaseSpace had done motion capture for The Amazing Spider-Man, some of which was not used in the film. The article described a Spandex suit with embedded wires and a setup in which one microcontroller drives 72 LEDs wired together on a two-wire bus.[12] In 2013 an NVIDIA blog post said the company had 15 employees in San Leandro and described McSheery's crew using PhaseSpace motion capture and GPU-equipped PCs in a "pre-viz" approach to make his animated film Tower of the Dragon, which the post said was being made for US$2 million.[13]

XR work

Research tracking

Jeremy Wendt's 2010 dissertation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, written under the direction of Fred Brooks, describes the GUD WIP walking-in-place system. It used an eight-camera PhaseSpace Impulse optical motion capture system, with seven LEDs on a part-cylindrical plate attached to each shin, and fed the tracker data to the software through VRPN.[5]

In 2015 McSheery co-authored a SIGGRAPH poster with researchers from the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, including Mark Bolas. Their "Virtual Headcam" placed zoom cameras on motorized mirrors around the volume of a PhaseSpace system. It used 120 Hz position and orientation data from active markers on top of each actor's head to aim the cameras at the actors' faces, as an alternative to head-mounted cameras for facial performance capture.[14]

Hunger in LA

Hunger in LA, a VR journalism piece by Nonny de la Peña, was shown in the New Frontier exhibition at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Its production page says PhaseSpace was used both for motion capture of the actors and for tracking the head-mounted display in real time, and credits McSheery with providing tracking and sponsorship. The prototype headset was developed at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies' MxR Lab by Mark Bolas, Palmer Luckey, Thai Phan and Evan Suma.[6]

Free-roam VR

In April 2016 Road to VR reported that Striker VR would rely on outside tracking for its Arena Infinity haptic gun and that its partner PhaseSpace would be among the first to receive the peripheral.[15]

PhaseSpace's VR project Aquarium Earth, a museum-style experience about ocean reefs affected by greenhouse gases, overfishing and pollution, was presented in the VR Experiences program at SIGGRAPH 2016.[10][16] Its partner TriHelix created Resistor, a multiplayer free-roam VR arcade game with custom PhaseSpace-tracked props including Gear VR crests and sci-fi blasters, described on the PhaseSpace site in December 2016.[17]

In April 2017 Road to VR described Planet Whack, a two-player game that PhaseSpace co-created with the San Francisco VR developer TriHelix and first made for SIGGRAPH 2016. Players wore Samsung Gear VR headsets fitted with low-profile LEDs, which added positional tracking to a headset that only tracked orientation on its own. A local server rendered the game from the position data and sent it back over Wi-Fi. The same report listed IMAX VR in Los Angeles and Santa Clara Paintball as sites using the system, and quoted business developer Elizabeth McSheery as saying the company was looking at letting customers buy access to the games once they could use its Unity SDK.[4] PhaseSpace exhibited at IEEE VR 2017 as a silver-level exhibitor.[18]

The company's archived VR page names multi-user and multi-prop tracking in large volumes, markers that keep working under DJ lighting and direct sunlight, daisy-chained cameras, a "Refresh Calibration" feature for high-traffic venues and a Unity SDK, and lists gaming, education and training as uses.[19] Its current entertainment page presents Bandai Namco's VR Zone Shinjuku attraction Ghost in the Shell: Arise Stealth Hounds as a customer application of location-based VR.[20]

Products

Product First documented Description
Impulse 2010 Active LED optical motion capture system; used in UNC walking-in-place research[1][5]
IMPROV 2011 Eight-camera system from US$19,950 with an HP Z210 workstation[11]
Glove Box 2011 IMPROV add-on for hand and finger capture[11]
Magic Window 2010 Real-time virtual camera for Impulse and IMPROV[1][11]
Impulse X2E 2017 Current system; 960 frames per second, daisy-chained cameras on RJ-45 cables[4][3]

PhaseSpace says the Impulse X2E cameras use customised linear detectors instead of RGB cameras, with what it calls 36,000 x 36,000 sub-pixel resolution in HDR, and sub-millimeter accuracy as low as 20 µm.[4] As of October 2026 its site lists two-camera systems from US$9,000 and additional cameras at US$2,000 each, with one RJ-45 connection carrying both signal and power to each camera.[3]

Other applications

PhaseSpace says its systems have been deployed in robotics labs, neuroscience research facilities, virtual production stages and defense applications.[8] In OpenAI's 2018 robot hand study, 16 PhaseSpace tracking cameras in a cage tracked the fingertips of a Shadow Dexterous Hand and, in one setup, the manipulated object.[21] The 2019 follow-up on solving a Rubik's Cube thanked PhaseSpace Inc. for building custom Rubik's cubes and supporting the motion capture setup.[22] The company describes itself as veteran-owned and says it has received more than US$10 million in U.S. government revenue through SBIR awards and system purchases, from the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, NASA, the Department of Energy and the Naval Research Laboratory.[8]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 "PhaseSpace Joins The Studio at SIGGRAPH 2010". Animation World Network. 2010-07-26. https://www.awn.com/news/phasespace-joins-studio-siggraph-2010. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "About the Founder". PhaseSpace. https://archive.phasespace.com/?p=5318. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 "PhaseSpace Motion Capture". PhaseSpace. https://www.phasespace.com/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Dominic Brennan (2017-04-13). "'Planet Whack' is a Multi-user VR Demo Showcasing PhaseSpace Motion Tracking". Road to VR. https://roadtovr.com/planet-whack-multi-user-vr-demo-showcasing-phasespace-motion-tracking/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Jeremy D. Wendt (2010). "Real-Walking Models Improve Walking-In-Place Systems". PhD dissertation, Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. https://techreports.cs.unc.edu/papers/10-009.pdf. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 "Hunger In LA". Bradley Newman. https://www.bradleynewman.io/hunger-in-la. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  7. ↑ "About PhaseSpace". PhaseSpace. https://archive.phasespace.com/?p=2333. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 "Get to Know Us". PhaseSpace. https://phasespace.com/get-to-know-us/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  9. ↑ "US6324296B1 - Distributed-processing motion tracking system for tracking individually modulated light points". Google Patents. https://patents.google.com/patent/US6324296. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 "Tracy McSheery". ACM SIGGRAPH History Archives. https://history.siggraph.org/person/tracy-mcsheery. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 11.3 "PhaseSpace Announces New Motion Capture Solutions". Computer Graphics World. 2011-08-05. https://www.cgw.com/Press-Center/Siggraph/2011/PhaseSpace-Announces-New-Motion-Capture-Solution.aspx. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  12. ↑ William G. Wong (2012-08-10). "Technologies Combine For Low-Cost Motion Capture VFX". Electronic Design. https://www.electronicdesign.com/markets/lighting/article/21789879/technologies-combine-for-low-cost-motion-capture-vfx. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  13. ↑ Tony Kontzer (2013-05-06). "How GPUs Are Taming Dragons on the Cheap for Indie Films". NVIDIA Blog (republished by Inknowvation). https://www.inknowvation.com/sbir/story/how-gpus-are-taming-dragons-cheap-indie-films?keywords=. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  14. ↑ Xueming Yu, Shanhe Wang, Jay Busch, Thai Phan, Tracy McSheery, Mark Bolas, Paul Debevec (2015). "Virtual Headcam: Pan/tilt Mirror-based Facial Performance Tracking". SIGGRAPH 2015 Posters. https://vgl.ict.usc.edu/Research/VHC/VirtualHeadcam_SIGGRAPH2015.pdf. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  15. ↑ Ben Lang (2016-04-12). "First Look: Striker VR Reveals Latest Prototype Design and Impressive Haptic Effects". Road to VR. https://roadtovr.com/striker-vr-arena-infinity-haptic-vr-gun-force-feedback-effects/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  16. ↑ "Aquarium Earth". PhaseSpace. https://archive.phasespace.com/?p=5950. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  17. ↑ "Resistor VR". PhaseSpace. 2016-12-20. https://archive.phasespace.com/?p=5951. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  18. ↑ "Exhibitors - IEEE VR 2017". IEEE Virtual Reality 2017. https://ieeevr.org/2017/program/exhibitors.html. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  19. ↑ "Virtual and Augmented Reality". PhaseSpace. https://archive.phasespace.com/?p=4994. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  20. ↑ "Entertainment". PhaseSpace. https://phasespace.com/use-cases/entertainment/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  21. ↑ OpenAI, Marcin Andrychowicz, Bowen Baker et al. (2018). "Learning Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation". arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.00177. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  22. ↑ OpenAI, Ilge Akkaya, Marcin Andrychowicz et al. (2019). "Solving Rubik's Cube with a Robot Hand". arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.07113. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
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