On Thursday, Magic Leap declared the acquisition of the Belgium-based startup that enables”Magic Leap One” users to take part in real-time telepresence conference calls with volumetrically captured avatars representing their actual bodies.
The team is joining Magic Leap but will continue to service their business customers, such as BNP Paribas and Orange, according to their site. The startup showed their video conferencing tech at CES this year, which allows someone in a Magic Leap One headset to picture a 3D illustration of someone during a”video” call.
Magic Leap is a company which provides an augmented reality app called Avatar Chat that offers users the capability to hold virtual meetings. However, Avatar Chat uses simplified 3D avatars that suggest the app more of a game-like sense rather than something developed for essential meetings.
What Mimesys does is take the digital meeting dynamic Spatial has been working, which utilizes 3D avatars that look like you, and builds it up by volumetrically capturing the actual vision of the user to give the virtual seminar an even more realistic feel.
As is true for almost all volumetric video footages, Mimesys’ early work appeared to suffer from some noisiness, though this acquisition makes one wonder whether Magic Leap will end up creating their own external depth camera hardware to appeal to enterprise clients.
“The spatial co-presence platform the team has created is remarkable, and we are thrilled to have them as part of our team. We anticipate further expansion of co-presence and cooperation tools on the Magic Leap platform,” said Omar Khan, Magic Leap’s chief product officer, in a statement.
Neither firm has disclosed the details of the Magic Leap deal, but the startup includes a rather small team, and its seed round of financing was reported as $1 million back in 2016, so this deal is not likely to generate a massive dent in Magic Leap’s multi-billion dollar financing arsenal.