Oculus today announced the acquisition of Pebbles Interfaces, an Israel based firm focused on depth sensing technology and computer vision for the purpose of hand tracking.
According to Oculus’ blog post, Pebbles Interfaces will officially be joining “the hardware engineering and computer vision teams at Oculus to help advance virtual reality, tracking, and human-computer interactions.”
Pebbles Interfaces’ technology is based on the ‘structured light approach’, and is said to be able “to detect and segment hands and human skin” with special emphasis on hand tracking.
The company has been around since its founding in 2010, and has spent the last 5 years building advanced motion sensors that display physical objects within digital space, supposedly “at any range or angle, with no latency.” Pebbles’ hardware also saw previous partnerships with smartphone manufacturers such as China based handset manufacturer Xiaomi.
“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.”
This story is breaking, we’ll add more details as we get them.