After a few years without acquisitions for Android, Google has just acquired GraphicsFuzz, a company that tests mobile graphics for possible bugs in their drivers and helps resolve them without disclosing the terms of the agreement.
The founders of the company, Alastair Donaldson, Hugues Evrard and Paul Thomson, will join the Android graphics team at Google to “integrate their specialized graphics driver test technology into the Android ecosystem,” says the company on its homepage.
We are excited to announce that GraphicsFuzz has been acquired by Google, and that we will be joining the Android Graphics team for lots more graphics fuzzing fun! Thank you to everyone who has supported us on our journey with GraphicsFuzz. https://t.co/HkvFFQ42C8
— GraphicsFuzz (@GraphicsFuzz) August 6, 2018
The technology behind GraphicsFuzz was developed by Alastair, Hugues, Paul and Andrei Lascu of the Computer Department of Imperial College London with financial support from the UK Engineering and Physical Science Research Council and the TETRACOM EU project.
From there, they are also the first to perform “metamorphic tests” by highlighting their ShaderTest GLES tool, which adds transformations to a reference image while retaining the semantics of the source code and compares the source image with the input image, whereby, if there are no coincidences, the transformations are reversed by the “intelligent reduction function” to reduce the cause of the error, as they highlight in VentureBeat.