Facebook buys British virtual reality start-up Surreal Vision

Facebook has bought an eight-month-old British start-up that recreates real-world scenarios in virtual reality.

Surreal Vision, which started life at Imperial College London, has been snapped up by Oculus VR, the company behind the Oculus Rift headset that was bought by Mark Zuckerberg’s social network for $2bn (£1.3bn) last year.

Surreal Vision has developed technology that allows users to interact in a computerised version of the real world. It aims to make this version is so real that it is impossible to distinguish between the two.

This could allow people to hold business meetings as if they are in the same room when in fact they are located in different countries - a process known as “telepresence”.

Surreal Vision’s founders - Richard Newcombe, Renato Salas-Moreno, and Steven Lovegrove - will all join Oculus, in Redmond, Washington state.

"We’re developing breakthrough techniques to capture, interpret, manage, analyse, and finally reproject in real-time a model of reality back to the user in a way that feels real, creating a new, mixed reality that brings together the virtual and real worlds," Surreal Vision said in a blog post.