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.
Patents (Score:2, Interesting)
Thats crazy for 2 reasons... (Score:5, Interesting)
2. Why the hell doesn't microsoft already own this? Seems like they made a monumental fuckup not buying this years ago, and now will be beholden to Apple.
Re:Patents (Score:2, Interesting)
It is common to regard the progress of technology over the past decade as magnificent.
But all the ingredients are much older than this. For the last decade of progress, all we really have are:
1) Apple, not for inventing usability, but for merely realising that it is important;
2) Chinese sweatshop labour for their undying devotion to increased efficiency.
All the current ideas had already been envisioned by the '70s, prototyped by the '80s, and implemented by the '90s. Today we just have a bunch of consolidated wankers shoving it down our throats.
Re:Thinking about applications... (Score:5, Interesting)
Technically it is nice. It works great for games. But Apple is not really a game company so I am thinking how they would use it.
This could be, next to really innovative uses that are outside my limited imagination:
- gesture control for TV (Apple TV or upcoming TV)
- gesture controle of home automation (considering that they also bought a home automation firm), perhaps the sensor could be in the upcoming iwatch
- gesture control, next to the current input methods for osx and IOS - but I am not yet sure about the extra value.
- turn an iphone into a 3D scanner by for example tracing the outline of an object with one corner of the device.
So, I can imagine some use cases outside gaming, but somehow what I can come up with seem rahter nice to haves than killer apps. Any other ideas?
I don't know how small you can make these scanners, but assuming the can be made to fit into a mobile device I can think of one more feature: Face recognition. That might spare Apple embarrassing moments like Google had with it's face recognition login feature [youtube.com]. People laugh about CCC hacking Apples fingerprint button [youtube.com], but at least that hack takes more than 20 seconds.
Junk Company (Score:2, Interesting)
1) the Kinect 2 in the Xbox One has NOTHING to do with the dreadful technology from PrimeSense
2) EVERYTHING clever the original Kinect did was a result of Microsoft's body detection algorithms, and NOTHING to do with PrimeSense
3) PrimeSense depth detection works in the most trivial (and unreliable) way. And optical sheet in front of a very bright light source projects thousands of carefully pre-calculated 'rays', creating an image that looks like a lot of "random dots". However, the 'random' dots have horizontal and vertical 'location' information encoded into their positions (via clusters of dots), and an ordinary camera records an image of these dots in a single photograph. A simple computer program identifies each dot and looks for vertical and horizontal displacement in the 2D image, which will allow a depth calculation to be made via simple parallax calculations.
This method is crude, and near impossible to make more accurate (why Microsoft fully dumped this method for Kinect 2). The so-called PrimeSense 'chip' is the real con, doing nothing more than code you could trivially run on any modern CPU.
Leap Motion does the same thing, with VASTLY better relative accuracy, using TWO cameras, and the usual stereo separation algorithms (and some clever statistical optical flow stuff). Both Leap Motion and PrimeSense have the advantage of being insanely cheap to manufacture.
Apple is almost certainly looking for simple gesture input systems, probably for its Apple TV products. Sadly, gesture input will remain a useless tick-box gimmick for companies competing amongst one another for business from idiots. It has no real world use (beyond exercise/dance games and 'fun' for very young children), because of its inherent 'fail to recognise input' rate, and an inability to input 'punctuation'.
Re:Patents (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple and MS have been at a patent truce for more than a decade, since the late 1990's. And continue to offer each other a very broad cross patent license agreement.
Remember the jog dial control on the iPod. Turns out MS held the patent on it. And it was covered under their cross patent licenses agreement.
MS offered the truce because they desperately needed Apple to avoid DOJ break up. But over the past decade it's proven to be useful for both sides. Largely the two companies don't directly compete with each other. Apple is a consumer electronics company. Microsoft is an enterprise software provider. There isn't a lot of overlap. At least not as much as people on /. would like to believe.
And strangely enough, the both need each other at this point to stem Google.