Ever since 2014 when Facebook acquired Oculus VR for 2 Billion dollars, the company has bought more than 15 other companies of special interest for its operations and technology. Some of them were purchased to improve or enhance the Virtual Reality experience developed by Oculus.
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Facebook’s Shopping List for the Oculus VR
We made a full list of all Facebook acquisitions destined to serve the Virtual Reality division of the company. It’s hard to know the exact purpose of each purchase but we can make an idea of the company’s vision by assembling this puzzle of acquired companies.
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Surreal Vision
* Date: 05/26/2015
* Technology: Computer vision, augmented reality.
* Amount: Undisclosed
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Surreal Vision was the first company acquired by Oculus. The company focuses on real-time 3D scene reconstruction, so it generates accurate representations of the real world in Virtual Reality. Great scene reconstruction enables a whole new level of presence and telepresence, allowing players to move freely around the real world and interact with real objects from within the Virtual Reality.
“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 re-project 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.”
The ability to apply virtual physics to real space is essential to AR projects like the Microsoft HoloLens. In this field, the Oculus has still limited real-world interactions in its own virtual worlds but it can overcome these limitations with the help of Surreal Vision.
Pebbles
* Date: 07/16/2015
* Technology: Computer vision, augmented reality.
* Amount: $60,000,000.
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Two Big Ears’ technology focuses on how sound plays in three-dimensional spaces and the way it interacts with the surfaces that surround the user.
“At Two Big Ears, we’ve been hard at work creating technology and tools that have defined how immersive audio is crafted and experienced in VR and AR both now and in the future.”
The Eye Tribe
* Date: 12/28/2016
* Technology: Eye tracking
* Amount: Undisclosed
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Source: Virtualrealitytimes