Facebook-owned Oculus Rift has acquired a London-based startup called Surreal Vision that maps real scenes in 3D onto virtual worlds. As well as enabling people to move around virtual reality worlds, the technology also makes it possible to interact with objects in the real world that have been reconstructed by the software.
Surreal Vision was founded by three former PhD students from Imperial College's Andrew Davison lab. Richard Newcombe, Renato Salas-Moreno and Steven Lovegrove will now work with the Oculus Research team, which is based in Redmond, Washington.
The ins and outs of what Surreal Vision does is perhaps best left to the team members to explain, which they have done in detail in Oculus' press release covering the acquisition. "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," they write. "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."
Not only does Surreal Vision's technology have the potential to create truly navigable gaming worlds, but it could allow for the kind of social networking and communication experiences Mark Zuckerberg has clearly been envisaging from the time Facebook first acquired Oculus.
Oculus has already acquired several startups that have been building technology compatible with its virtual reality ambitions, including motion-tracking company Nimble VR and the design team responsible for Microsoft Kinect. Surreal Vision's mapping technology seems highly compatible with the motion-tracking tech Oculus has already been working with. The 3D mapping technology could construct a virtual world that sits on top of the real one, and the motion-tracking software would then allow the players to move through that world, interacting with objects identified by Surreal Vision's image identification engine.
Of course this is a hypothetical scenario based on what we know about Oculus and the companies it has acquired. But given what Surreal Vision has to say, it's clear the company believes it can contribute to turning Oculus into the powerful tool Facebook clearly intends it to be. "By achieving the ability to continuously reconstruct and track the world around us, we'll be able to build an understanding of the world at a semantic level. This will bring the power of the digital world to the myriad of interactions we as humans perform everyday, leading toward a breakthrough in human-computer interaction and a computing platform that has true spatial awareness," says the team.
It's not long until all will be revealed; the VR headset is due to launch in early 2016.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
