CAMBRIDGE, United Kingdom — ARM today acquired Geomerics, the leader in lighting technology for the gaming and entertainment industries. The acquisition expands ARM’s position at the forefront of the visual computing and graphics industries. Additionally, the agreement enables Geomerics to build on their existing partnerships as well as accelerate their development in mobile.
“The innovative technologies being developed by Geomerics are already revolutionizing the console gaming experience and are set to rapidly accelerate the transition to photo realistic graphics in mobile,” said Pete Hutton, EVP and GM Media Processing Division, ARM. “Empowering Geomerics’ portfolio with ARM’s graphics capabilities and market reach will be transformative for the user experiences in future mobile and entertainment devices.”
Geomerics’ Enlighten is the worlds’ first fully real-time global illumination technology. With a focus on time-saving workflow features and a lightweight runtime, Enlighten is the only solution proven to deliver fully dynamic lighting on todays’ PCs, game consoles and mobile platforms. The technology has been the lighting solution of choice for some of today’s most advanced and best-selling game titles, including Battlefield 3 and 4, Need for Speed Rivals, Eve Online, and Medal of Honor: Warfighter.
“With lighting technologies developed by Geomerics, graphics artists can achieve truly realistic global illumination and other advanced lighting features in real time across multiple platforms today. This combination of ARM and Geomerics accelerates the realization of our vision to bring next generation console graphics to mobile devices,” said Dr. Chris Doran, COO, Geomerics. “Being part of ARM will allow us to accelerate our advanced developments for console and mobile platforms while also providing us with unmatched insights into the platforms and devices of tomorrow.”
Global illumination is a term used to describe advanced, photorealistic lighting effects in 3D graphics. Typical graphics applications today are limited to simple, direct lighting effects only. With global illumination, effects such as compound reflections, refractions, shadows and other advanced effects are enabled, providing more life-like graphics quality.
“Enlighten has helped EA provide new levels of realism and gameplay experience in titles such as our highly popular Battlefield franchise,” said Carl Almgren, Head of Development, Frostbite Game Engine. “We’re delighted that ARM is committed to on-going development on all the key game console platforms and graphics architectures, as well as the on-going development of Geomerics’ technologies.”
