ImagineOptix

ImagineOptix is a company engaged in development, licensing and production.

According to December 2021, the company produces thin optical films for the development of small, inexpensive and energy-efficient video projectors, as well as sells patented thin optical films and related products.

History

2021: Acquisition by Meta

Meta Platforms Inc. acquired the company ImagineOptix, a developer of practical solutions for augmented and virtual reality. This became known on December 21, 2021.

Meta has secretly bought out a virtual reality developer ImagineOptix
Photo source: newsweek.com

The deal wasn't public. On December 17, it was announced by analyst in the field of optical technologies Karl Guttag in his personal blog^[1]Just the other day Meta confirmed^[2] is the fact of the deal to The Information. The ImagineOptix site is no longer available, and the latest Internet Archive indexing is dated to early September. Probably, around that time the deal took place.

Established in 2004, ImagineOptix was engaged in the development of lighter and more energy-efficient optical systems for ARVR consumer/- devices. The company's developments include improved LCD displays, integrated infrared and visible light sensors, compact wide-angle pancake lenses, focus rearrangements and eye tracking.

The company itself claimed that its optical developments based on liquid crystal polymers open up practical applications that are unattainable with other technologies. In particular, LCP optics can be used with many wide-angle waveguides with high uniformity and complex aspherical lenses.

The company even had its own production facilities.

The acquisition of ImagineOptix for Meta (ex-Facebook) is far from the first episode of player takeover in the VR market: earlier the company bought such structures as Downpour Interactive, Ready at Dawn, Sanzaru Games, Beat Games and BigBox VR.

The renaming of Facebook to Meta was associated with the planned transformation of the company into a developer of the so-called metaverse - a permanent virtual space in which people can interact with each other and with digital objects using virtual reality technologies. In this regard, Meta for a long time has been collecting all the suitable developers of tools and technologies related to the VR/AR sphere under its wing, and ImagineOptix technologies for the proposed metaverse are a fundamental component. Most likely, Meta is negotiating with other companies and related technology areas, and you can expect other acquisitions in the near future, said Dmitry Gvozdev, CEO of Information Technologies of the Future.

According to Crunchbase, ImagineOptix some time before the sale attracted investments worth $20 million from^[3] venture funds]. The last round of investments worth $5 million was closed in March; Erin Clark, executive director of the company, later said that the company hoped to raise another $4 million from^[4].

Notes