The Xpress performance system has been used to perform 1.5 tonne hydraulic robots, fire breathing dragons, droids (BB-8), Rexy the T-Rex, animatronic puppets and computer generated characters for live events.

Xpress is a computer-aided puppeteering system designed and manufactured by micromagic systems for complex animatronics or live time CG character performance.  Used in conjunction with Micromagic's suite of custom controls, it allows many intricate moves to be performed simultaneously.  With the addition of motion filters and gain effectors, a single puppeteer is able to create a detailed and truley organic performance.

The video above is an animatronic head created for the film The World's End. This head was a farily simple design requiring only 12 servo motors to acheive the motion required for the shot. The head utilised one of our iPuP Performance Systems which is a compact embedded version of the Xpress system limited to fewer inputs and outputs but with much of the same functionality. The iPuP allows simple graphical programming of advanced features such as eye tracking, eye jitter and organic motion filtering to achive a more life like performace.

The video below demonstrates a Shadow motion capture suit being fed through the Xpress system via a propritory plugin. The data is then manipulated within Xpress and sent back out via UDP stream to a dedicated module that converts the UDP stream into a dynamixel data stream. A simialr system was used to control over 100 dynamixel motors and standard R/C servos for Maz Kanata in The Rise of Skywalker.