Oculus Acquires A Hand-Tracking Company And An Augmented Reality Company

Will the Oculus Rift someday bring your hands into virtual reality?

That seems to be a direction they’re moving in, based on some acquisitions they just made.

This morning, Oculus quietly disclosed a pair of acquisitions: Nimble VR, and 13th Lab.

Nimble VR is a hand-tracking, skeletal detection camera built almost entirely with the Rift in mind. You’d strap their camera to your Rift, and boom: your in-game hands and your real-life hands are moving in sync.

If that company sounds familiar, you might’ve seen their Kickstarter campaign. They set out to raise $62,500 back at the end of October, and had more than doubled that by the time they canceled the campaign this morning (in light of this acquisition) . Given that Oculus itself all began with a Kickstarter campaign, there’s something particularly sweet about that detail.

13th Lab, meanwhile, is a computer vision/augmented reality company. While their main project focuses on creating 3D maps from image data, they’ve also done work in image detection and augmented reality. One of their coolest tricks: detecting a room, then replacing it with a 1:1 3d environment they’ve turned into a video game. Sounds like a good fit for VR, right?

Financial details weren’t disclosed for either deal.

Check out the examples of what each company did down below.

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