Slashdot Mirror
Reports: Apple To Buy Israeli 3D Sensing Company PrimeSense
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.
Seems like a good way to get some patents to use against Microsoft.
Now we shall have Peace in our time.
It says Apple are about to 'invent' 3D sensing. How innovative of them!
1. Only 345 million? At least they actually produce something, Facebook offered to buy snapchat for 3 billion, and thats just another "me too" messenger service flavor of the month.
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.
They're a hardware company.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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?
Apple had tried buying PrimeSense before Kinect, but they rubbed the PS folks the wrong way (IIRC the characterization was that Apple acted like PS should be grateful at Apple wanting them and take whatever they offer). As for MS, they've moved on to their own internal tech for Kinect 2, so presumably, MS figured $350 million was too much for them.
Tells lot about priorities and mysterious ways evaluation works.
apple is about to invent the kinect!!!
Any 12 years old girl will tell you that the next gen mobile phone is holographic communication like we were promised in the first Star-Wars movie 36 years ago. Now we know Apple has been working on holographic projection for years, this here is for the holographic capture ...
Dah
From oy vey to iVey.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Firstly: Yes, I agree that whatever price Facebook offered, if it offered anything, to SnapChat is grossly exaggerated and out of proportion.
However, everyone seems to forget that SnapChat is in touch with almost 99% of all youth and a very large percentage of all smartphone users.
A "customer base" MUCH larger than anything PrimeSense will EVER dream of touching.
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'.
It was great to see PrimeSense offer an open API to interact with 3D sensing hardware when the kinect first hit the market. Now with their acquisition will their support of this standard be abandoned?
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be-T J
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/occipital/structure-sensor-capture-the-world-in-3d
3D sensor in a phone is a no-brainer once you see the possibilities.
This is going to be the next big thing in iPhone 6. 300mil is cheap for the next good reason for everyone to upgrade their iCrap.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Just Wow!
How paranoid can one get?
Is there any reason at all to assume this is anything more than a company, which happens to be American, interested in buying the assets of another company, which happens to be Israeli? If so, please do elaborate.
Shachar
for alternatives. When Apple bought AuthenTec (who made the fingerprint scanners on most laptops), they put out one final version of the software then unceremoniously dropped support for the hardware. Now the AuthenTec website is just gone. I managed to grab the latest (last) version of the software (for the scanner on my laptop) before the website vanished, but only because I happened to do a wipe and reinstall of the OS earlier in the year.
If Apple wants to make some tech exclusive to their devices, they have no problem with screwing over previous customers.