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Reports: Apple To Buy Israeli 3D Sensing Company PrimeSense

Posted by timothy on from the stereo-vision dept.

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.

27 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Patents by Inev · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Seems like a good way to get some patents to use against Microsoft.

    1. Re:Patents by grouchomarxist · · Score: 4, Informative

      Apple and Microsoft are at a patent truce. They co-own the patent holding company RockStar.

    2. Re:Patents by UnknowingFool · · Score: 5, Informative

      Also MS licensed Kinect technology from Prime Sense. These licenses don't go away simply because the company changes owners. SCO found out the hard way in the Novell case. They got the licensing business from Novell, not the copyrights. Just because they bought the business from Santa Cruz does not mean they can change the past agreements they made with Novell.

      --
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    3. Re:Patents by Savage-Rabbit · · Score: 2

      Seems like a good way to get some patents to use against Microsoft.

      Microsoft? Try, a good way to keep them out of the hands of Google/Samsung et al.

      --
      Only to idiots, are orders laws.
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    4. Re:Patents by gl4ss · · Score: 2

      Nokia, MS and Apple entered a court case unholy-union a few years back already(after Apple got spanked in the courts by Nokia) - they even moved a large portion of their offensive patents to a holding company....

      google is more likely to get into the receiving end(google glass gestures etc shit).

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    5. Re:Patents by mwvdlee · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Don't you just love how patents are primarily used to ensure technology will never be used and combined in new ways?

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    6. Re:Patents by bazmail · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The truce only holds for the patents that they have vested in RockStar. Any patent not fully vested is fair game. I would imagine the PrimeSense patents will be kept well away from RockStar. Companies often sue each other while having an otherwise perfectly workable relationship. See Samsung v Apple.

    7. Re:Patents by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 2
      Yes, this is true, but MS and Apple have no need, and probably no desire to sue each other.

      MS needs Apple to continue to exist as a computer maker, or their anti-trust problems grow. MS invested $150 million 15 years ago in Apple to keep them alive, for this very reason.

      Apple needs MS to promote and grow the Windows Phone. Frankly, Apple would MUCH rather have Windows Phone as the iPhone's competition rather than Android. And Apple would have the same problem with iPhone as MS does without competition.

      So they need each other. And Apple is, quite frankly, not going to get into the console gaming business any time soon... unless they buy Sony...

    8. Re:Patents by StripedCow · · Score: 2

      They use a LIDAR system for that. Pretty ancient technology. Also used for law enforcement (speed guns).
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car

      According to the article, this system costs $70.000 euros.
      That's a far cry from the $80 euros of a typical kinect system.

      I guess that's the price you pay for brute forcing your way into the market.

      --
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    9. Re:Patents by mwvdlee · · Score: 2

      Perhaps if you define all of technology as "iPhone".

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    10. Re:Patents by somersault · · Score: 3, 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.

      --
      which is totally what she said
    11. Re:Patents by gnasher719 · · Score: 2

      Nokia, MS and Apple entered a court case unholy-union a few years back already(after Apple got spanked in the courts by Nokia) - they even moved a large portion of their offensive patents to a holding company....

      When exactly did Apple get "spanked" by Nokia in the courts? Aren't we trying to re-write history here? As far as I remember, Nokia asked for insane patent fees, Apple offered to pay much more sane amounts, they finally settled in court, and Nokia published patent revenue that was quite in line with what you would have reasonably expected Apple would pay.

    12. Re:Patents by rvw · · Score: 2

      Steve Jobs saved Apple, not Bill Gates.

      With the helping hand of Steve Ballmer...

    13. Re:Patents by Karlt1 · · Score: 3, Informative

      The truce only holds for the patents that they have vested in RockStar. Any patent not fully vested is fair game.

      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.

    14. Re:Patents by ducomputergeek · · Score: 3, 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.

      --
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  2. Thats crazy for 2 reasons... by bazmail · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Thats crazy for 2 reasons... by Sockatume · · Score: 3, 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.

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    2. Re:Thats crazy for 2 reasons... by tlhIngan · · Score: 2

      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.

      Not quite inhouse, but not PrimeSense either. Microsoft acquired a company that specialized in low-cost time-of-flight cameras and that's what's in the Kinect 2 (PrimeSense is based on structured light fields).

      Or, in other words, Kinect 2 again messes with the 3D imaging companies by offering a low-cost time-of-flight 3D imager, something that would've cost easily hundreds of thousands of dollars.

      Of course, you can't use the Xbone one in a PC yet - but Microsoft promises it will be out for Windows in 2014. Given the unsubsidized Kinect was $250, even if Kinect 2 was $300, that's still a mighty cheap 3D imager.

      (And given how popular the old Kinect was...).

  3. Re:Apple bought Israel? by cheater512 · · Score: 2

    Yeah but Microsoft will just buy Hezbollah *cough* sorry I mean Lebanon.

    They'll probably throw Iran in for cheap as well.

  4. Thinking about applications... by Camembert · · Score: 2

    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?

    1. Re:Thinking about applications... by Savage-Rabbit · · Score: 4, 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. People laugh about CCC hacking Apples fingerprint button, but at least that hack takes more than 20 seconds.

      --
      Only to idiots, are orders laws.
      -- Henning von Tresckow
  5. Re:SnapChat fo 4 bil and Prime sense for 345 mil by king+neckbeard · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Or it might just say something about Facebook and Snapchat's executives have no idea what anything is actually worth.

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  6. Snapchat vs PrimeSense by TFlan91 · · Score: 2

    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. Re:Snapchat vs PrimeSense by MysteriousPreacher · · Score: 2

      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.

      Heinz has a user base much larger than Intel's. A comparison between Heinz and Intel seems just as disjointed and useless as comparing SnapChat's user base (online service for consumers) with PrimeSense (licensing tech and selling niche hardware to geeks).

      --
      -- Using the preview button since 2005
  7. Junk Company by Anonymous Coward · · 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'.

  8. What will happen to OpenNI? by nickmalthus · · Score: 2

    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?

    --
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  9. This KS campain is the reason for buyout. by citizenr · · Score: 2

    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.

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