Reports: Apple To Buy Israeli 3D Sensing Company PrimeSense 81
Several sources, including this report at Forbes, and this one at All Things Digital, say that Apple has bought (or is in the process of buying) Tel-Aviv based PrimeSense, the company behind the 3-D sensing technology in Microsoft's Kinect, for $345 million. The Forbes piece also gives a compact but interesting summary of the possibilities of ubiquitous 3-D hardware, and the sudden, recent drop in price of the components necessary for that to happen. Devices like the Lynx 3-D scanner that I saw at last year's SXSW (targeting the cheap and portable end of the 3-D scanning market) may have a lot of competition in the near future.
Re:Patents (Score:5, Informative)
Apple and Microsoft are at a patent truce. They co-own the patent holding company RockStar.
Re:Patents (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Thats crazy for 2 reasons... (Score:4, Informative)
The obvious answer is that Primesense knew that they were worth more money as a free agent than MS could offer them to work exclusively (they've been licencing the same reference design out to other companies since Kinect came out). I guess Apple wrote a bigger check.
For what it's worth, I've read that Kinect 2 is enough of an in-house MS Research project that Primesense were not involved.
Re:Patents (Score:4, Informative)
That sounded a bit unlikely to me, so I looked up the actual quote:
The United States is proud to stand with you as your strongest ally and your greatest friend
The way he's worded it, he could be saying that they're friends and allies, just that he considers the US stronger and more great than everyone else.
Re:Patents (Score:4, Informative)
The MS/Apple patent truce dates back to a 5 year patent cross licensing deal back in 1997. Apple and MS haven't gone after each other at all since then.