Facebook Buys VR Start-Up Two Big Ears, Makes Its Tech Free

Virtual reality audio is about to get a boost, thanks to Facebook.

The social network has acquired virtual reality audio firm Two Big Ears, and is making the company's technology available to everyone gratis. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Now, anyone with a Mac running OSX 10.7 or later can head here and download Spatial Workstation, a software suite for designing spatial audio for 360-degree video and cinematic VR, for free. The suite includes plugins for popular audio workstations, a time-synchronized 360 video player, and utilities to help design and publish spatial audio in a variety of formats. Facebook said support for Windows is coming in the "near future."

In a statement, Two Big Ears said it will be able to scale its technology more quickly as part of Facebook. The company added that it will be working with the Oculus team to "combine our expertise and create best in class VR audio" and assured developers that it plans to stay "platform and device agnostic" going forward.

"We're excited to be able to continue developing great tools for a larger number of people across the world," the company wrote. "With more resources and scale, we look forward to accelerating development of many features, including support for Windows and more VR devices."

Existing Spatial Workstation Pro customers will continue to receive support as per their agreements with Two Big Ears for the next 12 months. All Pro customers should have already received login details to a support channel. If you have not received this information, contact the company here.

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.