Facebook buys VR audio company Two Big Ears, debuts ‘Facebook 360 Spatial Workstation’

Today Facebook announced it’s acquired Two Big Ears, a spatial audio technology company, for an undisclosed sum.

Now part of Facebook, Two Big Ears’ Spatial Workstation has been repackaged and rebranded as the free “Facebook 360 Spatial Workstation.” Two Big Ears says support for its paid licenses will be wound down in the next 12 months.

Here’s the meat of the announcement, from Facebook [emphasis ours]:

Starting today, our pipeline for cinematic VR and 360 video, including the authoring tools, encoder and rendering engine are available for free via download below. We’re excited to be able to continue developing great tools for a larger number of people across the world. 3Dception for Games will no longer be a separate product but we will be working with the Oculus team to combine our expertise and create best in class VR audio. Existing Pro customers will continue to receive support in accordance with your current agreement for the next 12 months.

The deal brings new audio expertise to Facebook and Oculus, but according to Two Big Ears, the audio toolkit “will continue to be platform and device agnostic” — and support for Windows is apparently still on the way.

Past Two Big Ears partners include YouTube.