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Facebook today announced the acquisition of CTRL-Labs, a company that makes a bracelet capable of transmitting electrical signals from the brain into computer input.
The deal, which CNBC report represents about $ 1 billion, is the largest acquisition that Facebook has made in the past five years, since it has spent $ 2 billion to acquire the virtual reality company Oculus VR in 2014. It also marks a substantial increase in investment in the growing ambitions of Facebook's hardware, CTRL-Labs technology will be used in future augmented reality and virtual reality projects of the social network.
Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, head of AR and VR on Facebook, announced this announcement on his personal Facebook page tonight. Bosworth said that CTRL-Labs, co-founded by Internet Explorer creator and neuroscientist Thomas Reardon, "will join our Facebook Reality Labs team where we hope to build this type of technology on a large scale and integrate it faster into consumer products. "
Patrick Kaifosh is the other co-founder of CTRL-Labs and neuroscientist. Reardon, the company's CEO, left his software engineering career to study neuroscience and earned his PhD in 2016. The company was created the year before and has since raised $ 67 million in venture capital.
According to Mr. Bosworth, the CTRL-Labs wristband will contribute to the development of new methods of interacting with machines without resorting to traditional keyboard / mouse configurations, touch screens or any other type of physical controller. "Technology like this has the potential to open up new creative possibilities and reinvent 19th century inventions in the 21st century world," he writes. "This is how our interactions in virtual reality and virtual reality can ever come out. It can change the way we connect. "
For Facebook, the acquisition represents a renewed commitment to the kind of futuristic technology that seemed to be fleeing the company's Building 8 initiative, an experimental laboratory inspired by Google's X Division, briefly led by the former director of DARPA , Regina Dugan. The lab struggled to produce meaningful research or products beyond the Facebook portal's video chat feature, and it was eventually closed and its various projects split into several divisions.
The remnants of Building 8 became the Facebook Reality Labs team that Bosworth oversees, but it was only when Dugan left the company in late 2017 without any evidence of keeping it out of the audacious brain-machine interface announcements at the company's F8 developer conference two years ago. Brain-to-computer interface projects are still running at Reality Labs starting in July. But what once seemed like the dream of Facebook executives designed to shape the company in the image of Google now seems much more serious with Reardon and CTRL-Labs in the mix.
Just last week, Facebook announced the creation of two models of anti-glare glasses, one similar to Snap Spectacles and the other, considered a standalone Google Glass style device, which is the ideal candidate for the type of interface developed by CTRL-Labs.
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