Oculus Rift has acquired Surreal Vision, a British company which focuses on real-time 3D scene reconstruction. The company joins the research division of the virtual reality company.
Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
The three founders, Richard Newcombe, Renato Salas-Moreno and Steven Lovegrove, who are all PhDs from Imperial College London, will join Oculus’s team in Redmond, Washington.
Oculus Rift, Facebook’s virtual reality technology, will be available to consumers in the first quarter of 2016. The headset will come with a full ecosystem, which includes a hardware and software package designed for gamers.
The Oculus team commented in a blog: "Surreal Vision is one of the top computer vision teams in the world focused on real-time 3D scene reconstruction – generating an accurate representation of the real world in the virtual world.
"Great scene reconstruction will enable a new level of presence and telepresence, allowing you to move around the real world and interact with real-world objects from within VR."
"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," read a statement from the Surreal Vision team.
"Ultimately, these technologies will lead to VR and AR systems that can be used in any condition, day or night, indoors or outdoors. They will open the door to true telepresence, where people can visit anyone, anywhere."
It added: "We’re developing breakthrough techniques to capture, interpret, manage, analyse, 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.
"Given the team, the resources, and this shared vision, there’s no better place for us to help bring about these breakthroughs than Oculus. We’re incredibly excited for the future."
