While Faultline does not believe in either voice or gesture control for TV and gaming in the near future, Microsoft has already made some money out of it, and the future of many UIs will include this type of technology, no matter how immature it is right now. Given that and the litigious nature around patents these days, there was always going to be some consolidation of the patents involved in gesture control and this week both Apple and Intel are reported to be on the trail of Israeli start-ups in the area.
According to reports, Intel has already signed up for a $40 million deal to buy Omek Interactive, snagging it from under the noses of Samsung and Qualcomm. The firm has raised about $14 million to date.
Omek provides gesture recognition technology for video games, consumer electronics, cars and casinos, using a sensor to track a user’s movements and integrate the data into a program. The technology can work over long distances, like Microsoft Kinect or Nintendo Wii, and the firm also has a shorter range version called Grab, for PCs. The start-up’s employees will move to Intel’s perceptual computing division in Haifa, northern Israel.
Meanwhile, Israeli business journal Calcalist says Apple is negotiating to buy Tel Aviv-based chipmaker PrimeSense, which actually enables the motion control in Kinect. Its chips also go into mobile devices, robots and televisions and give the products depth perception as well as movement tracking, allowing them to ‘see’ objects in 3D. That means a shared product such as a TV can detect the position of several people in a room and distinguish them from each other, and from furniture.
The smaller firm has raised about $85 million in venture capital to date and Calcalist’s sources believe it could get a price of $280 million to $300 million. Apple last went shopping among Israeli silicon vendors in late 2011, when it acquired Flash memory controlled company Anobit.
Of course, even if the talks are at an early stage, they will spark speculation about how Apple might use motion control technology, with the long awaited new generation of Apple TV the most likely candidate, however Apple has introduced a level of gesture control into iOS 7, as a way of controlling apps using head movements. However all the demonstrations of that we have seen are awful.
Going back to 2010 we saw Microsoft stumbling upon the same route, buying up a company that could have created a rival to its Kinect product, in the form of Canesta. Funnily enough this had been the company behind the Sony Eyetoy that kicked off this entire gesture control debate.
Canesta, similar to Primesense, invented a single chip 3-D sensing platform plus 44 patents granted and more applied for, and made breakthroughs in areas such as enabling natural user interfaces broadly across many platforms. Both the Canesta system and Project Natal use standard CMOS 3-D sensing chips, something that Sony is a market leader in producing.
In July 2011 Qualcomm bought the 3D gesture based IPR from GestureTek, known to hold a considerable amount of basic gesture patents, with the company then promising to focus on its digital signage business instead.
Even operators have tried to get in on this act and in 2010 Belgacom acquired in3Depth systems a local specialist in 3D-gesture recognition for its second generation IPTV program.
A couple of years ago we met with the Kinect inventors Primesense at IBC and were mightily unimpressed, and its big differentiator was this 3D technology which is achieved by sending different codes out in an IR light source form the TV and detect the same codes when they return. It creates what it calls a 3D image map of the entire room and knows how far away each thing is. Then when one of these timings change, for instance if you shift your hand forward, it senses the difference and all the logic is brought down to a specialist chip which tracks these objects.
The interest in all these companies suggests that the remote gesture market is still in its infancy and despite a head start in Kinect, all of these companies will begin to trump each other with a succession of product launches, where controlling TV will be the de facto demonstration, and gaming will be the main payoff.
Kinect uses the Primesense technology embedded into Xbox games and into controlling the TV the Xbox is connected to. It is now in its second generation and has been the one conspicuous success in recent Xbox history.
Expect Microsoft to begin to sue Samsung over smart TVs which emulate this and the Apple TV upgrade when it comes, and anything that Intel comes out with. It acquired quite a few patents when it bought Canesta and some 250 are thought to have been filed by Microsoft itself. But of course by then perhaps Apple will own the patents that Microsoft relies upon, so perhaps this is a shrewd move by Apple.
We have tried to track down the technology that Samsung uses for the new gesture control on its TVs, but so far have been unsuccessful and we’re unsure of its patent position in remote gesture control, but we’re sure this will be established in courtrooms.