Oculus Acquires Computer Vision Company Surreal Vision

Oculus has acquired Surreal Vision, a computer vision company based in U.K. Announcing the news on its website, Oculus confirmed that the Surreal Vision team—six people all in all—is joining its research labs. Surreal Vision specializes in bringing super-human visual perception to virtual reality and robotics.

The startup was founded by three computer vision scientists: Richard Newcombe, Renato Salas-Moreno, and Steven Lovegrove—all PhDs from Andrew Davison’s pioneering lab at Imperial College London. Newcombe is credited for inventing KinectFusion, DynamicFusion and DTAM (Dense Tracking and Mapping), while Salas-Moreno invented SLAM++ and Dense Planar SLAM. Meanwhile, Lovegrove authored SplineFusion.

According to Oculus, Richard, Renato, and Steven will continue their brilliant work at the Oculus Research lab in Redmond, Washington. The other members of Surreal Vision are Stephen Crampton (Chairman), Andrew Davison (Advisor), and Paul Kelly (Advisor). The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Surreal Vision is a natural fit for Oculus. The company’s inventions will help Oculus in generating accurate representations of the real world in the virtual world. One of the coolest inventions is SLAM++, which maps an environment and recreates a virtual version of what it sees, including objects like tables and chairs. Even better, SLAM++ considers anything that it sees as separate entities.

“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,” Surreal Vision said in a statement. “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.”