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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.
Apple and Microsoft are at a patent truce. They co-own the patent holding company RockStar.
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
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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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.
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
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.
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-- Henning von Tresckow
Or it might just say something about Facebook and Snapchat's executives have no idea what anything is actually worth.
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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.
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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