Improbable, which was founded five years ago by Herman Narula and Rob Whitehead, has achieved a Softbank (the company that purchased ARM backing in a funding round that values the business at more than $1bn. >Despite this cash injection, it looks like Improbable will stay independent to work on their purported aim: to build large-scale virtual worlds and simulations. These could be leveraged by games developers, or some other, non-gaming investments and applications, such as transport systems modelling, virtual couch-travelling, and military applications.

Founder Herman Narula said that Improbable's vision "is to create completely new realities, massive virtual worlds that can change the way we live and work and can impact the way we understand some of the hardest problems." The company believes it has developed revolutionary technology with its Spatial OS operating system, which it has recently opened up to other developers. A Google partnership to put its system on the search giant's cloud, thus allowing small developers to create massive simulations without much infrastructure of their own, means real business for this company, and the backing of one of tech's giants lends credence to their ambitions. Let's see where this leads, but it seems that tales of VR's death were greatly exaggerated. You can discuss these finding here, on our very own TPU Virtual Reality Club.