Big tech snags Hollywood talent to pursue enhanced reality

Silicon Valley’s biggest companies are snapping up the people and technology behind some of Hollywood’s blockbusters in an effort to improve their augmented- and virtual-reality offerings.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc. are among the tech giants that in recent years have been both luring visual artists away from Hollywood and acquiring technology first used to create digital effects for blockbusters like “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” and “Avatar.”

While VR is almost completely immersive, AR superimposes images onto the real world. Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft Corp. and others are developing special glasses or headsets for these applications, also called extended reality.