Facebook Inc.-owned Oculus VR has announced that it has acquired Surreal Vision, a U.K.-based startup that specializes in 3D mapping and image recognition. Surreal Vision says its company works on “bringing super-human visual perception to the emerging fields of mixed reality and autonomous robotics,” and now it will be part of Oculus’ ongoing virtual reality projects.

“At Surreal Vision, we are overhauling state-of-the-art 3D scene reconstruction algorithms to provide a rich, up-to-date model of everything in the environment including people and their interactions with each other,” the Surreal Vision team said in a blog post for Oculus. “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.”

This mixed reality system, also called telepresence, is a type of virtual reality that gives users the illusion of being physically present in a real world space. Telepresence has numerous use cases, ranging from unmanned space exploration to educational field trips to virtual tourism and more.

“Much progress has been made toward this future, but significant challenges remain, the Surreal Vision team said. “For virtual reality, the accuracy and quality of the continuously updating 3D reconstruction must be near flawless, which is a requirement almost no other modern computer vision problem faces. When we cross these seminal thresholds, users will perceive the virtual world as truly real – and that is the experience we’re driving toward.”

They added, “Given the team, the resources, and this shared vision, there’s no better place for us to help bring about these breakthroughs than Oculus. We’re incredibly excited for the future.”

According to Oculus, Surreal Vision’s three founders, all PhDs from Imperial College London, will be joining the VR company as part of the Oculus Research office in Redmond, Washington.

Image credit: Oculus VR