It’s been a while since Oculus talked about new additions, but today it has made it public that more industry professionals are joining its ranks. These are Nimble VR, 13th Lab and Chris Bregler, all specialized in computer vision.
Nimble VR, formerly known as 3Gear Systems, was founded in 2002 by Robert Wang, Chris Twigg and Kenrick Kin. Its low-latency skeletal tracking system for the Nimble Sense hands, whose Kickstarter campaign was a great success, has caught the attention of Oculus who, as it has already stated on more than one occasion, was looking for something similar. The campaign has already been canceled and the money has been returned to the backers, so we will have to wait to see it working and become an official Oculus product.
The 13th Lab team has been dedicated to developing a real-time 3D reconstruction framework, that is, capturing 3D models, such as the pyramids of Egypt or the Colosseum of Rome. They have developed such curious products as Minecraft Reality, which allows combining the real world with Minecraft, or SLAM, a system used by NASA robots to create maps of unknown environments and position devices in them with great precision thanks to its PointCloud SDK.
Finally, Chris Bregler is a veteran in motion capture. In fact, he has worked on blockbusters such as The Lone Ranger and Star Trek into Darkness, nominated for Oscars for special effects.
These professionals will be devoting more and more time to Oculus, and once they conclude their current projects they will do it full-time, something similar to what happened with John Carmack. The company founded by Palmer Luckey clearly shows that it seeks to create more than just an HMD.
