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October 24, 2018 10:00 am

Lyft Buys AR Company To Bolster Its Self-Driving Car Efforts

Lyft is acquiring Blue Vision Labs, a UK-based augmented reality firm whose underlying technology helps cars both know their location and understand their surroundings. It's also unveiling its first test vehicle to advance its vision for self-driving cars. TechCrunch reports: The first car from Lyft's Level 5 self-driving initiative will be the Ford Fusion Hybrid. While the integration of Lyft's autonomous technologies and a Ford car is impressive, perhaps more meaningful is the company's acquisition of Blue Vision Labs, a startup out of London that has developed a way of ingesting street-level imagery and is using it to build collaborative, interactive augmented reality layers -- all by way of basic smartphone cameras. Blue Vision will sit within Lyft's Level 5 autonomous car division headed up by Luc Vincent (who joined the company last year as VP of engineering after creating and running Google Street View). The startup and its staff of 39 (everyone is joining Lyft) will also become the anchor for a new R&D operation in London or the San Francisco-based company, focused on that autonomous driving effort. Level 5 is stepping up a gear in another way today, too: Lyft is unveiling a new vehicle that it will be using for testing. Blue Vision has developed technology that provides both street level mapping and interactive augmented reality that lets two people see the same virtual objects. The company has already built highly detailed maps that developers can now use to develop collaborative AR experiences -- it's like the maps of these spaces become canvasses for virtual objects to be painted on. Over time, we may see various uses of it throughout the Lyft platform, but for now the main focus is Level 5. The report doesn't provide an exact amount that Blue Vision was acquired for, but people familiar with the acquisition say it's around $72 million with $30 million on top of that based on hitting certain milestones.

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