Facebook just boosted its VR efforts with an acquisition of immersive audio company Two Big Ears -- and it's making the 3D audio startup's technology available free to developers.

The social media giant made its interest in virtual reality obvious back when it bought the pioneering VR startup Oculus, and on Monday the company made another move towards its vision of social VR with another acquisition.

Free Tools for VR Audio

Two Big Ears started in 2013 with a focus on the audio side of immersive virtual reality. According to Tech Crunch, the company has been working on two 3D audio projects, one for for cinematic VR and one for gaming.

Now, the cinematic VR project has been opened up by Facebook through its free "Facebook 360 Spatial Workstation" for developers, while Two Big Ears will be working with Oculus on integrating its gaming project.

The Facebook 360 Spatial Workstation, according to Two Big Ears' announcement, includes authoring tools, the encoder, and rendering engine for spatial audio for cinematic VR and 360 video production.

And these tools are now available for free, for anyone to download. In an interesting inversion of the typical platform availability, right now, you have to have a Mac in order to use the software. But Engadget reported that Windows support is coming soon.

Spurring More (& Higher Quality) VR Content

"Our mission is to make VR audio succeed across all devices and platforms and continue to help creators make the best experiences for billions of people across the world," wrote Two Big Ears.

The move is smart for Facebook, which is always looking for more content in general, but when it comes to 360-degree video, is also looking to enable producers to make better quality content as well -- especially content that can spur user adoption of VR headsets.

Of course, looking anywhere in a 360 degree video with an Oculus of Gear VR headset is obviously better than clicking around the same video without VR gear. But eventually making all of those videos spatially immersive for users' second-most important sense, sound, will give Facebook's VR devices another significant selling point.