AMD Acquires Nitero IP To Make Virtual And Augmented Reality Gaming Cord Free

It's no secret that AMD loves virtual reality, with many folks at the company exhibiting real passion about its possibilities in the future. The sky's the limit, as they say -- or it at least it could be once we figure out what we can do about those pesky cables!

If a survey was conducted among HTC Vive and Oculus Rift owners, we'd no doubt hear back that most people would rather get rid of their cables more so than they'd like to see other upgrades. When you're worried about tripping over cables, or worse, need a dedicated cable handler, it can begin to suck the fun out of VR immersion.

Current VR tech is great, but ugh, the cables!

AMD, and its CTO Mark Papermaster, understands this all-too-well, and doesn't just consider it a nuisance, but an actual detriment to the adoption of VR: "Unwieldly headset cables remain a significant barrier to drive widespread adoption of VR". As such, the company found startup Nitero to be a hot target to help solve this problem, as it focuses solely on wireless VR.

Terms of the deal haven't been revealed, but with it, AMD gains not only the rights to Nitero's IP, but also some of its "key engineering talent".

AMD has been heavily promoting VR with its recent GPUs

Wireless VR tech isn't new, and there are many companies working on similar technologies as we speak, so the fact that AMD chose to pursue Nitero gives us a hint of how far along the company's technologies must have been. Using a 60GHz wireless band, Nitero's chip can help enable gigabit-level wireless performance, for problem-free, room-scale VR environments.

In time, the biggest issue in VR won't be tripping over cables, but instead simply making sure you don't enjoy your freedom so much that you end up bumping into other objects in the room!