Apple has acquired Spaces, a VR company that gave both experiences and, after the COVID-19 pandemic, a way of bringing your virtual avatar into Zoom meetings. Protocol quotes an unrevealed Apple spokesperson offering the usual boilerplate confirmation, saying that it had nothing else to include.
Spaces are, or was, a company that began offering free-roam VR experiences, similar to what the Void offered before the pandemic. It was spun out of DreamWorks, and its first project was a Terminator-themed VR game for up to four players. But the most interesting thing about it was the facial tracking is used to try and make its VR games more interesting than its rivals.
Before you began playing one of Space’s experiences, your face would need to go through scanning by a wall-mounted camera. This data was then overlaid onto your in-avatar, so your fellow players were playing with you inside the virtual world. It may have been particularly accurate, but it included another level of fidelity on top of the sometimes-artificial VR experience.
When the pandemic hit, Spaces had to shut down its real-world business and pivot to stay alive. But it took that face-scanning tech and reconstructed a platform onto which you could scan your own face and place it on a virtual avatar. You could then connect your VR setup to zoom and present as a cartoon version of yourself.
Given Apple’s interest in facial scanning and cartoonish avatars (memoji), it seems like there’s plenty of reason for Apple to buy Spaces. Perhaps it’ll use the Spaces team to bolster its existing efforts in the VR/AR space or use the technology to improve FaceTime with virtual characters.
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