Oculus, the Facebook-owned company behind Oculus Rift, has today announced the acquisition of a UK based 3D Mapping company Surreal Vision, whose software can map and re-create the real world in a virtual environment.
Financial details about the deal haven’t yet been disclosed by either of the companies. However, with this acquisition, Oculus is probably now looking to foray into mixed reality, a concept which combines real world content with virtual content.
In a statement from Oculus VR, it said,
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.
Surreal Vision was founded in 2014 by Richard Newcombe, Renato Salas-Moreno and Steven Lovegrove. All the three founders will continue doing their work as a part of Oculus Research in Washington.
Oculus was founded in 2012 by Palmer Luckey and was acquired by Facebook in March 2014 for $2 billion. Till now, it has received $93.4 million in three funding rounds from six investors. The company’s first virtual reality product – Oculus Rift is going to launch in Q1 of 2016.
