Friday, July 17, 2015., Oculus VR has announced Thursday that they agreed to buy the Israel-based company Pebbles Interface.
“We’re excited to announce that we’ve entered into an agreement to acquire Pebbles Interfaces — one of the leading teams in depth sensing technology and computer vision,” Oculus VR said in a blogpost.
Last year, the social media giant Facebook has acquired Oculus VR for $2 billion.
According to Wall Street Journal, “It didn’t disclose a price tag, but one person familiar with the matter said it was around $60 million.”
Pebbles Interfaces has spent the past five years developing technology that uses custom optics, sensor systems and algorithms to detect and track hand movement.
“Over time, technology breakthroughs in sensors will unlock new human interaction methods in VR and revolutionize the way people communicate in virtual worlds.”
Pebbles Interfaces will be joining the hardware engineering and computer vision teams at Oculus to help advance virtual reality, tracking, and human-computer interactions.
“We’ve seen virtual reality make huge strides, changing the way people interact with one another. At the forefront of that shift is Oculus, and joining Oculus will help advance our vision building immersive experiences and revolutionizing digital human interaction.”
In the above video, Pebble’s technology is implemented into Facebook’s Oculus Rift headset. They enable users to interact with the device via hand and finger gestures. Unlike competing gesture-identification technologies, Pebbles enables users to see images of their own arms and hands in their virtual-reality display.
Nadav Grossinger, CTO of Pebbles Interfaces, said, “At Pebbles Interfaces, we’ve been focused on pushing the limits of digital sensing technology to accelerate the future of human-computer interaction. Through micro-optics and computer vision, we hope to improve the information that can be extracted from optical sensors, which will help take virtual reality to the next level. We’ve always believed visual computing will be the next major platform in our lifetime, and we’re excited to join the Oculus team to achieve that vision for the future.”
