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Surreal Vision

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Surreal Vision
Information
Industry Computer vision, 3D scene reconstruction
Founded 6 October 2014
Founder Richard Newcombe, Renato Salas-Moreno, Steven Lovegrove
Headquarters Bushey, United Kingdom (business address)
Parent Oculus VR (from 2015)
Website https://surreal.vision/

Surreal Vision was a computer vision and 3D reconstruction company that was acquired by Oculus VR in 2015.[1] The London-based startup developed camera-based software for real-time dense 3D scene reconstruction, the process of building an up-to-date digital model of a real environment from a moving sensor.[2][3]

The company was founded by three former PhD students of Imperial College London's Robot Vision Group: Richard Newcombe, Renato Salas-Moreno and Steven Lovegrove, whose earlier research included the KinectFusion, DTAM and SLAM++ systems.[4][1] Oculus announced the acquisition on 26 May 2015 and moved the team into Oculus Research in Redmond, Washington. The price was not disclosed.[3] The company's stated aim was to model real surroundings well enough for users to move around the real world and interact with real objects from within VR, and to support mixed reality and telepresence.[1][5]

Reviewed 27 September 2026. Acquisition date, founders, research credits and quotes against the Oculus blog, Road to VR, Game Developer, TechCrunch, UploadVR, Fortune and Imperial College; Companies House incorporation, officers, liquidation and dissolution records; company website details; and the six research papers or pages cited. About review dates.

History

Surreal Vision Limited was incorporated on 6 October 2014 as a private limited company (company number 09249961).[6] Its first directors were Steven Lovegrove and Stephen Crampton.[7] The company website lists Crampton as chairman and Imperial College professors Andrew Davison and Paul Kelly as advisors. It describes the company's goal as "bringing super-human visual perception to the emerging fields of mixed reality and autonomous robotics".[8] All three founders had been supervised by Davison in the Department of Computing.[4] The site gave the company's business address as Bushey.[8]

In the acquisition announcement, the team wrote: "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."[3] It said that such reconstruction would open the way to telepresence and to VR and augmented reality systems "that can be used in any condition, day or night, indoors or outdoors".[1][9] Game Developer quoted the company as saying it was "developing breakthrough techniques to capture, interpret, manage, analyse, and finally reproject in real-time a model of reality back to the user".[2]

Companies House records show three new directors appointed on 21 April 2015; on the same date the founders and Crampton ceased to be directors.[7] The public announcement followed on 26 May 2015, when Oculus said the team had joined Oculus Research and would continue its work on computer vision and scene reconstruction in Redmond.[1] UploadVR counted the deal as Oculus's fourth acquisition since Facebook bought it in 2014, and the third focused on computer vision after 13th Lab and Nimble.[10] Oculus Research was renamed Facebook Reality Labs in May 2018, in a change announced by chief scientist Michael Abrash.[11]

The UK company was later wound up. A members' voluntary liquidation began on 28 September 2018, and Surreal Vision Limited was dissolved on 13 September 2019.[12][6]

Founders and research

The founders' research centered on dense simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), where a system tracks a camera's position while building a detailed surface model of the scene around it.[3][13] Oculus described the three founders as follows.[1]

Founder Research credited in the acquisition announcement
Richard Newcombe Inventor of KinectFusion, DynamicFusion and DTAM (Dense Tracking and Mapping); co-inventor of SLAM++[1]
Renato Salas-Moreno Inventor of SLAM++ and Dense Planar SLAM[1]
Steven Lovegrove Co-inventor of DTAM; author of SplineFusion[1]

The main papers behind that work are:

System Authors Venue What it does
KinectFusion Richard A. Newcombe, Shahram Izadi, Otmar Hilliges, David Molyneaux, David Kim, Andrew J. Davison, Pushmeet Kohli, Jamie Shotton, Steve Hodges, Andrew Fitzgibbon ISMAR 2011, pp. 127-136 Fuses depth frames from a Kinect sensor into one global surface model in real time, tracking the sensor against the growing model[14]
DTAM Richard A. Newcombe, Steven J. Lovegrove, Andrew J. Davison ICCV 2011 Dense, every-pixel camera tracking and reconstruction from a single moving RGB camera[15]
SLAM++ Renato F. Salas-Moreno, Richard A. Newcombe, Hauke Strasdat, Paul H. J. Kelly, Andrew J. Davison CVPR 2013 Object-level SLAM: uses a single depth camera to track position while mapping the scene and recognizing objects as separate entities[16][3]
SplineFusion Steven Lovegrove, Alonso Patron-Perez, Gabe Sibley BMVC 2013 Continuous-time framework for visual-inertial SLAM and calibration, including rolling-shutter cameras[17]
Dense Planar SLAM Renato F. Salas-Moreno, Ben Glocker, Paul H. J. Kelly, Andrew J. Davison ISMAR 2014 Maps a scene densely with bounded planes and surfels from depth images, so that walls and other flat surfaces can display AR content[13]
DynamicFusion Richard Newcombe, Dieter Fox, Steve Seitz CVPR 2015 (Best Paper Award) Extends KinectFusion-style dense SLAM to scenes with moving, non-rigid subjects in real time[18]

According to the company website, Newcombe worked at Microsoft Research in Cambridge during his PhD, which led to KinectFusion, and had been a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Washington since 2013. Lovegrove did postdoctoral work at George Washington University, and Salas-Moreno had earlier worked on video games such as Blur at Bizarre Creations in Liverpool.[8] DynamicFusion, written at the University of Washington, won the Best Paper Award at CVPR 2015 in June of that year, a few weeks after the acquisition was announced.[18] In September 2025 Meta identified Newcombe as its Research Science VP in a post on Reality Labs research.[19]

Reaction

Coverage at the time read the purchase as a move by Oculus toward mixed and augmented reality. UploadVR wrote that the pattern of computer vision acquisitions suggested Oculus wanted to release a headset with inside-out tracking and mapping built in.[10] In Fortune, Gartner analyst Brian Blau said it was "imperative that Oculus start to integrate scene mapping technologies" to deliver immersive content, while Piper Jaffray analyst Travis Jakel expected early uses in theme parks and arcades and said the technology was still years away from consumer homes.[9]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 Oculus VR (2015-05-26). "Announcing the Acquisition of Surreal Vision". Meta Quest Blog. Meta. https://www.meta.com/blog/announcing-the-acquisition-of-surreal-vision/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Christian Nutt (2015-05-26). "Oculus acquires Surreal Vision, a startup that brings the real world to VR". Game Developer. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/oculus-acquires-surreal-vision-a-startup-that-brings-the-real-world-to-vr. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Ben Lang (2015-05-26). "Oculus Acquires Computer Vision Company Surreal Vision for 3D Scene Reconstruction". Road to VR. https://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-acquires-computer-vision-company-surreal-vision-for-3d-scene-reconstruction/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Press Office, Communications and Public Affairs (2015-06-11). "Facebook buy Surreal Vison, a company founded by three ex DoC PhD students". Imperial College London News. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/166087/facebook-surreal-vison-company-founded-three/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  5. ↑ Darrell Etherington (2015-05-26). "Oculus Acquires Surreal Vision To Bring The Real World To VR". TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/?p=1162053. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 "SURREAL VISION LIMITED overview". Companies House. GOV.UK. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/09249961. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 "SURREAL VISION LIMITED people". Companies House. GOV.UK. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/09249961/officers. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 "Surreal Vision". Surreal Vision Ltd. https://surreal.vision/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 John Gaudiosi (2015-06-01). "What the Surreal Vision acquisition means for Oculus". Fortune. https://fortune.com/2015/06/01/oculus-surreal-vision-acquisition/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Will Mason (2015-05-26). "Oculus acquires computer vision company Surreal Vision, 'will lead to VR and AR systems'". UploadVR. https://www.uploadvr.com/oculus-surreal-ar-vr/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  11. ↑ Lucas Matney (2018-05-07). "Oculus Research is now the 'Facebook Reality Lab'". TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/07/oculus-research-is-now-the-facebook-reality-lab/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  12. ↑ "SURREAL VISION LIMITED insolvency". Companies House. GOV.UK. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/09249961/insolvency. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Renato F. Salas-Moreno, Ben Glocker, Paul H. J. Kelly, Andrew J. Davison (2014). "Dense Planar SLAM". IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) 2014. http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~bglocker/pdfs/salas-moreno2014ismar.pdf. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  14. ↑ Richard A. Newcombe, Shahram Izadi, Otmar Hilliges, David Molyneaux, David Kim, Andrew J. Davison, Pushmeet Kohli, Jamie Shotton, Steve Hodges, Andrew Fitzgibbon (2011). "KinectFusion: real-time dense surface mapping and tracking". Lancaster University research directory. doi:10.1109/ISMAR.2011.6092378. https://research.lancaster-university.uk/en/publications/kinectfusion-real-time-dense-surface-mapping-and-tracking/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  15. ↑ Richard A. Newcombe, Steven J. Lovegrove, Andrew J. Davison (2011). "DTAM: Dense Tracking and Mapping in Real-Time". IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2011. https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ajd/Publications/newcombe_etal_iccv2011.pdf. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  16. ↑ "Renato Salas-Moreno". Robot Vision Group, Imperial College London. https://wp.doc.ic.ac.uk/robotvision/person/salas-moreno/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  17. ↑ Steven Lovegrove, Alonso Patron-Perez, Gabe Sibley (2013). "Spline Fusion: A continuous-time representation for visual-inertial fusion with application to rolling shutter cameras". British Machine Vision Conference 2013. https://www.bmva-archive.org.uk/bmvc/2013/Papers/paper0093/paper0093.pdf. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 "UW CSE's Richard Newcombe, Dieter Fox and Steve Seitz win Best Paper Award for DynamicFusion at CVPR". Allen School News. University of Washington. 2015-06-08. https://news.cs.washington.edu/2015/06/08/uw-cses-richard-newcombe-dieter-fox-and-steve-seitz-win-best-paper-award-for-dynamicfusion-at-cvpr/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  19. ↑ "Contextual AI and the Future of Human Connection". Meta Quest Blog. Meta. 2025-09-18. https://www.meta.com/blog/michael-abrash-richard-newcombe-contextual-ai-reality-labs-research-connect-2025/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
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