The first OptiFest brought customers and partners from around the world to Corvallis, Oregon for three days of hands-on sessions, factory tours and an early look at what comes next.
For three days in October, customers and partners from around the world travelled to the beautiful Pacific Northwest and walked through every door of our headquarters. No booth, no demo reel. The actual volumes, the actual factory, and the actual people: the engineers who design the cameras, the developers who write the code, and a support team with more years in mocap than almost anyone in the industry.
That was the whole idea. A trade show gives you twenty minutes at a booth. We wanted to give people three days with the entire company, with nothing between them and the person who could answer their question.
Hands-on, where it's built
Sessions ran inside our capture volumes, not a conference room. Virtual Production & eSync/PTP. Markerless in Motive. Camera Models & Optics. Unreal Engine 5.8 Integration. Edit Tools & Trained Markersets. Every one of them was led by the people who built what they were showing, with the hardware running a few feet away.
The Open Panel on software, hardware and support put the people who build, test and support the product on one stage and let the room drive: seventy-five minutes of the questions people had been saving up.
Between sessions, the factory tours ran to the minute, on the floor where every camera is built and tested. The Customer Showcases turned the microphone around and let attendees present their own work to a room of their peers. And the graffiti wall, a tracked spray can and a very large LED screen, found a crowd in every gap in the schedule.
What's next, seen first
Attendees learned about ActiveIO: Next Generation Active Tracking and saw an exciting collaborative project between OptiTrack, Planar, and MegaPixel. The closing keynote by renowned creative innovator Jim Geduldick talked about where the industry is going. We showed what we're working on now and what comes after it, and most of it had never left the building. The people in the room saw it, touched it, and asked their questions straight to the source. The rest will be announced when it's ready.
The third day belonged to our reseller partners: training, a session on the marketing support behind them, and a feedback session titled OptiTrack Moving Forward: What YOU Want Next. It was scheduled for an hour. With questions arriving by phone the whole time and our QA and engineering leads in the room to answer them, it ran well past two, because nobody on either side of the table wanted to stop.
What we heard
The thing we heard most often was some version of "nobody in this industry is doing anything like this." The sessions drew the most consistent praise; and a lot of people learned a lot. The Customer Showcases, where attendees presented their own work, were named as a favorite by people who hadn't expected them to be.
Several guests asked how soon they could order what they had just seen, and some asked to take systems home with them. And a good number of people asked, before they had left the building, when they could come back.
We took notes on all of it. The questions, the requests, the things people wished we had shown: we heard you all and can't wait for the next time.
Thank you
To every customer and partner who made the trip, some of you across an ocean: thank you. You gave us three days of your time and a long list of things to do with it. To the OptiTrack team who built walls, rebuilt volumes and stayed late for weeks so that the building was ready: this was yours as much as anyone's.
