Social networking giant Facebook has acquired Two Big Ears, a UK-based virtual reality start-up. Two Big Ears is a company that specialises in immersive or virtual reality audio.
With this acquisition, Facebook will expand its virtual reality business and will integrate the technology being developed by Two Big Ears into its own VR projects. The financial terms of the acquisition have not yet been disclosed.
Two Big Ears has been working with video game developers to incorporate spatial audio into video games.
Spatial audio is a concept which uses a combination of speakers, amplifiers and sound processing technologies, which together create sound which should closely match natural sound that our ears can pick up.
The start-up company said that its 3Dception technology will not be a standalone product anymore.
Instead, it will be offered as a bundle under Facebook’s Oculus, where their expertise will be added to the software development of Oculus.
The startup company said that it will scale up its technology and operations after this acquisition and will speed up the process of providing immersive audio experience.
Two Big Ears also said that it will continue to work with clients other than Facebook and / or Oculus and will continue to offer platform and device-independent VR software.
In its blog post, Two Big Ears said: "Starting today, our pipeline for cinematic VR and 360 video, including the authoring tools, encoder and rendering engine are available for free via download below.
"We’re excited to be able to continue developing great tools for a larger number of people across the world."
The software suite offered by Two Big Ears will include plugins for popular audio workstations, time-synced 360 video player and other utilities that design and publish spatial audio in several formats.
