Xsens

Xsens
Information
Industry	Inertial motion capture, inertial sensors
Founded	2000
Founder	Casper Peeters, Per Slycke
Headquarters	Enschede, Netherlands
Notable Personnel	Eric Salzman (CEO)
Products	Xsens MVN motion capture suits (Link, Awinda); Xsens Animate, Analyze and Humanoid software; MTi, Sirius and Avior inertial sensors; Xsens DOT; finger-tracking gloves by Manus
Website	https://www.xsens.com

Xsens is a Dutch-founded maker of inertial motion capture systems and inertial sensors. Casper Peeters and Per Slycke, physics graduates of the University of Twente in Enschede, Netherlands, started it in 2000 in a small room at the university. Its best-known product line is the Xsens MVN family of body-worn suits. They use inertial measurement units and sensor fusion software instead of cameras to record a performer's movement, and they stream that data into game engines such as Unreal Engine and Unity.

Between 2014 and 2026 the company changed owners several times. Fairchild Semiconductor bought it in 2014. It passed to ON Semiconductor in 2016, and mCube acquired it in 2017. mCube later took the name Movella and listed on Nasdaq in 2023. In March 2026 the business began operating under the Xsens name again, as Xsens Technologies. In VR and AR, Xsens suits have been used to put a user's full body into a virtual scene, and studios have used them to animate characters for VR games such as Creed: Rise to Glory.

Reviewed 4 October 2026. Founding, ownership changes (Fairchild, ON Semiconductor, mCube, Movella, 2025 restructuring, 2026 rename), CEO, offices, product table and XR uses checked against the cited Xsens, University of Twente, SEC, U-Today, eeNews, Road to VR and UploadVR pages. About review dates.

History

Founding and early products

According to a University of Twente interview with Slycke, the idea came from a business plan competition run under the university's TOP scheme. A friend who ran competitively asked why bicycles had speedometers but runners did not. Slycke and Peeters concluded that an accelerometer on the foot would work best, and developed the sensor technology with University of Twente professor Peter Veltink, who became their supervisor. Sports brands showed interest, but after the attacks of 11 September 2001 they backed away. The founders then offered their sensor technology more widely, including to companies and universities researching drones, robots, VR and AR. Xsens won the university's Van den Kroonenberg Award for young entrepreneurship in 2006.

The company's own timeline gives 7 April 2000 as its incorporation date. It launched its first IMU, the MT9-A, in 2002, and launched the MTi for industrial applications and the MTx for human applications in 2005. It launched Xsens Moven in 2006. The runner's speedometer did not have the commercial success the founders had hoped for, but many customers bought the sensors to measure body movement. Xsens responded with the MVN suit, a suit fitted with sensors that digitizes a wearer's movements; unlike a camera-based system, it keeps working when the person is out of the cameras' view. Director Tim Burton used it for effects work on Alice in Wonderland (2010), which the company lists as the first use of Xsens in a major film production. In 2009 it incorporated Xsens North America Inc. in Los Angeles.

Fairchild, ON Semiconductor and mCube

U-Today, the University of Twente's news outlet, reported in March 2014 that Fairchild Semiconductor had fully acquired Xsens in January of that year and that Xsens would keep its location in Enschede. Fairchild formally announced the purchase on 13 May 2014 at the Global Semiconductor Alliance Executive Forum in Munich. It said Xsens would operate as an independent subsidiary headquartered in Enschede, and named Electronic Arts, NBC Universal, Daimler, Autodesk, ABB and Siemens among Xsens customers. At a meeting held alongside the same forum, Fairchild chief executive Mark Thompson said the company had spent about 60 million US dollars on Xsens.

ON Semiconductor acquired Fairchild in 2016, which brought Xsens with it. On 9 November 2017, mCube, a maker of monolithic MEMS and CMOS motion sensors, completed its acquisition of Xsens, which it described as a 3D motion tracking products and technology company, from ON Semiconductor. The announcement gave Xsens's headquarters as Enschede, with a further office in Los Angeles.

Movella

On 27 September 2021 mCube announced that it was rebranding as Movella. The new name covered mCube, Xsens and Kinduct, an athlete and health data company acquired in 2020, and the announcement kept the Xsens name for products such as Xsens Animate and Xsens Analyze. Movella went public by merging with the special purpose acquisition company Pathfinder Acquisition Corp. The deal closed on 10 February 2023, and the stock was expected to begin trading on Nasdaq as MVLA on 13 February 2023. The transaction gave Movella a pro forma enterprise value of 504 million US dollars and included 75 million US dollars of financing from affiliates of Francisco Partners.

Movella's stock was delisted from Nasdaq on 9 April 2024, and a Form 15 suspending its SEC reporting obligations took effect on 30 April 2025. On 6 May 2025 the company announced a restructuring in which its secured lenders, funds of FP Credit Partners, exchanged their debt for 100% of the equity of its operating subsidiary, Movella Inc., and a new 50 million US dollar replacement note. The new owner was Movella Holdings NewCo, LP, a Delaware limited partnership affiliated with the FP Credit Partners funds that held Movella shares. The announcement said Movella Inc. would continue to operate under the new parent with no anticipated changes.

Return to the Xsens name

On 24 February 2026 the company said it would operate as Xsens Technologies from 1 March 2026, bringing the company name into line with its product brand. As of October 2026 the company's website names Eric Salzman as chief executive. He joined the board in 2023 and was appointed CEO in January 2024. The contact page lists offices in Enschede, El Segundo (Los Angeles area, California), Halifax (Nova Scotia, Canada) and Shanghai.

Products

Xsens sells two broad kinds of product: full-body motion capture systems with their software, and stand-alone inertial sensor modules for industrial, robotics and vehicle use. The motion capture systems use inertial sensors rather than cameras, so they can record in a studio, an office or outdoors.

Product	Year	Type	Notes
MT9-A	2002	Inertial measurement unit	First Xsens IMU
MTi and MTx	2005	Inertial sensors	MTi for industrial applications; MTx for human applications
Xsens Moven	2006	Motion capture system	Launched in 2006
MTw	2010	Wireless inertial tracker	Wireless motion tracker
MTi 1-series	2015	Inertial sensor module	Miniature module
MTi 600-series	2019	Inertial sensor modules	Sensor module series
Xsens DOT	2020	Wearable sensor	Wearable inertial sensor
Xsens Gloves by Manus	2021	Finger-tracking gloves	Made with Manus
Xsens Prime 3 Gloves by Manus	2024	Finger-tracking gloves	Launched at the 2024 Game Developers Conference; 3,799 US dollars; adds finger data to Xsens Animate captures
Xsens Sirius	2024	Inertial sensor series	Industrial-grade series with IMU, VRU and AHRS variants, succeeding the MTi 100-series; announced 19 November 2024
Xsens Animate 2025	2025	Motion capture software	Released 13 May 2025; revised spine model, male and female anatomical models, experimental automatic sensor mapping for Awinda
Xsens Link (next generation)	2025	Motion capture suit	Announced 12 November 2025 and available globally from that day; Wi-Fi 6E, hot-swappable batteries, washable integrated cabling; paired with Animate, Analyze and the robotics-focused Xsens Humanoid software

XR work

Xsens showed a camera-free, full-body tracking setup at CES 2013: 17 wireless MTx inertial trackers worn around the body, processed by its MVN sensor fusion software. Road to VR wrote at the time that, paired with a VR headset, such a suit could support full-body avatar embodiment in games. It also noted that Xsens planned to license the technology rather than sell it to consumers. The company has since marketed its suits for producing character animation for VR, AR and mixed reality. It also advertises plug-ins for Unity and Unreal Engine and 3D positional aiding with HTC Vive hardware. Its Live Link plugin for Unreal Engine (versions 5.4 to 5.7 as of October 2026) streams live data from Xsens Animate and Xsens Analyze into the engine.

Some documented uses in VR and AR:

• AR research (2013): researchers from Augsburg University and the Human Interface Technology Lab New Zealand combined an MVN suit with Vuzix STAR 1200 head-mounted displays. The system tracked the user's body and head without markers so that virtual agents could react to the user's position.
• Project Myron (2017): students at Saxion University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands built a multiplayer VR shooter for the Oculus Rift. Players competed in two teams of two and wore Xsens MVN suits for full-body tracking, Manus VR gloves for the hands and backpack PCs.
• Bebylon: Battle Royale (2018): Cory Strassburger of Kite and Lightning paired an Xsens MVN Link suit with a helmet-mounted iPhone X for facial capture to animate characters for the studio's VR game.
• Creed: Rise to Glory: in a 2019 Xsens case study, Survios animation director John Kim described using the MVN suit to capture boxing animation and opponent reactions, saying Xsens allowed the team to "capture an idea and put it in virtual reality in the same day".

In March 2024 Movella and HTC announced native integration between Xsens Animate and HTC's VIVE Mars CamTrack and VIVE Tracker 3.0, aimed at virtual production. It supported real-time scenes with up to two characters and a tracked camera, and the companies planned to demonstrate it at GDC in San Francisco from 18 March 2024.

See also

• Motion capture
• Body tracking
• Inertial measurement unit
• Sensor fusion
• Perception Neuron
• OptiTrack