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Oculus will purchase Pebbles Interfaces in a deal that has been estimated to be worth about $60 million by the Wall Street Journal. Oculus said that Pebbles Interfaces has been developing sensor systems, algorithms and custom optics in order to track and detect hand movement for a long time now.
Nadav Grossinger the CTO at Pebbles Interfaces said that the company focused on forcing the limits of the technology of digital sensing in order to boost the future of computer-human interaction with the help of computer vision and micro-optics. He said that they hope to perfect the data that can be gathered from optical sensors. This will help virtual reality reach the next level. Grossinger added that the company always believed that visual computing will end up being the next major platform we get to see in our lifetime and the company is very thrilled to begin working alongside the team at Oculus in order to realize this vision of the future.
Pebbles Interfaces has recently added its technology inside the virtual-reality set created by Oculus, which lets users interact with the unit by using finger and hand gestures. The technology developed by Pebbles Interfaces allows users to see their own hands and arms while wearing the virtual reality headset.
Pebbles Interfaces is the latest extension in the portfolio from Oculus, along Carbon Design, the designer behind the Xbox 360 controller. The product engineering and industrial design team from Seattle was bought by Oculus for an unknown amount last year in June.
Oculus bought in July RakNet, a networking middleware system company and started to open source its C++ library. This was part of the deal made with the company. Oculus also welcomed the addition of the Nimble VR, 13th Lab, and a motion-capture band manned by only one person called Chris Bregler last December. This year in May, Oculus also bought Surreal Vision a team of three people who focus on real-time reconstruction of 3D scenes.
Facebook purchased Oculus itself last year in March for a sum of around $2 billion. At the moment of the acquisition, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and founder of Facebook, said that even though mobile is today’s most favorite platform, the company is entirely ready for what new platforms tomorrow might bring.
Mark Zuckerberg said that Oculus has the opportunity to create the best and most social platform created and it is capable of changing the way people communicate, play and work.
Image Source: blogs-images.forbes.com
