Facebook’s Oculus buys computer vision startup to help the Rift understand the world

The Oculus Rift already understands where you are looking and how you’re moving your body — and now, thanks to an acquisition, it may soon understand the space around you.

Oculus VR, the Facebook subsidiary responsible for the latest virtual-reality revolution, just acquired technology startup Surreal Vision. Neither company disclosed the terms of the deal. Surreal will bring its “real-time 3D scene reconstruction” technology to Oculus. So one of the biggest names in virtual reality now owns one of the companies designing spatially aware computers. Put more simply, combining the Rift headset with Surreal Vision would enable VR software to see the real world around the player and possibly bring those objects into the games. This could potentially solve many of the problems that walking around a room with a screen over your eyes creates.