Oculus VR, the Facebook subsidiary responsible for the latest virtual-reality revolution, just acquired technology startup Surreal Vision. Neither company disclosed the terms of the deal. Surreal will bring its “real-time 3D scene reconstruction” technology to Oculus.
So one of the biggest names in virtual reality now owns one of the companies designing spatially aware computers. Put more simply, combining the Rift headset with Surreal Vision would enable VR software to see the real world around the player and possibly bring those objects into the games. This could potentially solve many of the problems that walking around a room with a screen over your eyes creates.
Richard Newcombe, Renato Salas-Moreno, and Steven Lovegrove are the founders of Surreal Vision. They will continue working together on their technology as part of Oculus’s research division in Redmond, Wash. The three men wrote a statement about the acquisition, and they even explained how their world-tracking magic works.
“Over the past three decades, a great deal of work in computer vision has attempted to mimic human-class perceptual capabilities using color and depth cameras,” reads the team’s statement. “At Surreal Vision, we are overhauling state-of-the-art 3D scene reconstruction algorithms to provide a rich, up-to-date model of everything in the environment including people and their interactions with each other.
We’re developing breakthrough techniques to capture, interpret, manage, analyze, and finally reproject in real-time a model of reality back to the user in a way that feels real, creating a new, mixed reality that brings together the virtual and real worlds.”