Oculus acquired a UK startup to help it transform physical spaces into virtual worlds

Facebook-owned virtual reality company Oculus has acquired a company that scans real-world environments and turns them into interactive virtual reality spaces, The Verge reports.

Surreal Vision is a UK company that reconstructs physical spaces as virtual worlds. That's an attractive technology for Oculus, which is working on virtual reality.

Combine Oculus and Surreal Vision and you have the potential to scan your living room into a game and then wander around a virtual version of it. Sure, that sounds boring, but it could also populate the virtual version with characters and objects. 

Here's a video from Surreal Vision showing how the technology can be used to turn a normal space into an augmented reality "Gangnam Style" dance party:

This kind of augmented reality is pretty similar to something that Microsoft has been working on. The Microsoft HoloLens lets customers scan real environments, and then interact with them digitally. Now, Oculus has the same capability.

Surreal Vision is going to be integrated into the Oculus VR team in the US, and so its UK team will be relocating to Redmond in Washington, where Oculus is based.

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