Online taxi company Lyft has acquired British company Blue Vision Labs for 72 million dollars. That focuses on location determination using just a smartphone camera. With those images, Blue Vision Labs can make detailed 3D maps, the claim is.
According to an announcement on Medium, Blue Vision Labs’ technology works by combining images from multiple smartphone cameras mounted in cars to create a large, detailed 3D map of a city. That map, combined with the input from the camera of the self-driving car itself, should ensure that a car must know where it is ‘accurate to centimeters’.
In addition to the $72 million, or $63 million, an additional $30 million will be paid out to the previous owners if certain performance goals are met, according to TechCrunch. Blue Vision Labs was founded in 2016 by graduates from Oxford University and Imperial College London, among others. Earlier this year, Blue Vision became a bigger player in the market thanks to a financing round that had raised $14.5 million, including from Google.
Lyft further states that it wants the team working on autonomous driving to double in size in the next year and a half. The American company has been working in this area for a little over a year and currently has about 300 engineers working in the autonomous driving department. There are 39 employees at Blue Vision Labs.
At the same time, Lyft unveils its next test car. That will be a hybrid Ford Fusion.