Self-declared “mad scientist” Bertrand Nepveu wanted to take a sip of beer but couldn’t see the bottle while wearing his start-up’s virtual reality headset.
So the dreadlocked engineer looked for a solution to not being able to see real objects while being plunged into a virtual world. His company Vrvana repurposed the cameras in its “Totem” prototype, which had been designed to sense a user’s position, to allow users to also view their surroundings.
The breakthrough led Apple to acquire Vrvana for $30mn in 2017. That acquisition is just one of a dozen purchases in the fields of virtual and augmented reality that the iPhone maker has made over the past six years.