Facebook Acquires High-Quality VR Audio Company

Facebook has made it pretty clear that it’s serious about virtual reality. It acquired Oculus a couple of years ago to get into the VR hardware game and now it’s improving the software side of things to enable the creation of more immersive and improved virtual reality experiences. Facebook today announced that it has acquired Two Big Ears, a company working on high-quality VR audio.

Following the acquisition, Two Big Ears’ high-quality VR audio platform “Spatial Workstation” is being rebranded as Facebook 360 Spatial Workstation and many of its tools will be available to developers for free.

The authoring tools, encoder, and rendering engine are all available as a free download. Two Big Ears does confirm that 3Dception for games is no longer going to be available as a standalone product, but the team will work with its colleagues at Oculus to create “beast in class VR audio.”

Given that this acquisition has been done under the Facebook banner, it goes without saying that it’s as much about 360-degree video as it is about virtual reality. Facebook is working hard on making 360-degree video an integral part of its social network so acquiring a company that has a platform for mixing audio so that it sounds realistic and three-dimensional fits nicely in its agenda.

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We’re excited to announce that we’re joining Facebook and making many of our products free! https://t.co/54Jgn8WsT7 pic.twitter.com/LjsTvZJKMi

— Two Big Ears (@TwoBig_Ears) May 23, 2016

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Gadgets
Tags: Facebook, oculus, Virtual Reality (VR)