FB owns Oculus.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: Facebook-owned virtual reality company Oculus has announced the acquisition of Surreal Vision, a U.K.-based company that scans real world environments and turns them into interactive virtual reality spaces, according to The Verge.
Combine Oculus and Surreal Vision, and you have the potential to scan your living room into a game and then wander around a virtual version of it, reported Business Insider.
Surreal Vision’s goal at Oculus is to perfectly capture and reconstruct the outside world in a virtual environment so that a user wouldn’t even be able to distinguish between the two experiences.
According to TechCrunch, such a feat would enable telepresence on an entirely new scale; “you could attend a meeting on Mars from the comfort of your office, for instance, or just visit with relatives in an instant from the opposite side of the country.”
“Ultimately, these technologies will lead to VR and AR systems that can be used in any condition, day or night, indoors or outdoors,” the Surreal Vision team collectively wrote on Oculus’ blog. “They will open the door to true telepresence, where people can visit anyone, anywhere.”
Surreal Vision was founded by three researchers from Imperial College London: Richard Newcombe, Renato Salas-Moreno, and Steven Lovegrove. All three members of the U.K.-based team will relocate and join Oculus Research in Redmond, Washington, to continue their work.
“This will bring the power of the digital world to the myriad of interactions we as humans perform [every day], leading toward a breakthrough in human-computer interaction and a computing platform that has true spatial awareness,” they wrote.