Apple has confirmed last week’s reports that it was buying motion tracking specialist PrimeSense, whose chip powers Microsoft’s Kinect gesture-driven gaming system. This deal highlights the importance of new types of user interface for the platform giants, and may also signal an impending patents war in the area.
Insiders say Apple will pay about $350m for Israel-based PrimeSense, which was backed by some pedigree investors, including Canaan Partners, Silver Lake, Gemini Israel Funds and Genesis Partners. They should be delighted – PrimeSense was understood to have raised just $85m in venture capital prior to the sale.
Of course, the deal will spark all kinds of speculation about how the company might harness the motion control technology in iDevices and Apple TV, as well as the implications for Microsoft Kinect.
Microsoft has built aggressively on the relatively simple PrimeSense base with its own enhancements, particularly in developing far greater accuracy – Kinect 2 is said to be able to detect a finger movement within nanoseconds. It is now built around a 1920 x 1080 RGB camera, and has an improved infrared sensor and has added voice controls. Microsoft presumably has a long term licence for the PrimeSense chip and intellectual property, so Apple would only be able to use the patent defensively, and will still have a great deal of R&D work to do, to catch up on Microsoft’s lead, of almost four years, in enhancing the PrimeSense-based offering.
Whatever the specific product plans, the acquisition shows how Apple is increasingly wanting to direct and control its own hardware, buying a series of chip companies starting with PA Semi ‘ whose silicon underpins the iPhone apps processor ‘ in 2008. It also bought Intrinsity, to enhance its processor capabilities further, in 2010; flash memory firm Anobit in 2012; and Passif Semiconductor earlier this year.
Apple would not open up on its plans for PrimeSense. A spokesperson took the standard Apple line with Bloomberg: ‘Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.’
There are other possibilities beyond a Kinect-like development. The start-up’s technology enables digital devices to detect movements and objects, translating those inputs into depth and color. Although most famous for gaming applications, particularly Kinect, it has also been developing depth-sensing systems which work with a 3D cameraphone for purposes like indoor navigation or interactive 3D shopping catalogs.
This could be its most immediate usefulness to its new parent, given Apple’s struggles to create a rich navigation and location platform capable of outdoing Google’s and Nokia’s. It has made a string of acquisitions of companies with innovative navigation software, including Embark, HopStop.com, Locationary and WifiSlam.
Also, the Israeli company has built a mobile system called Capri which is designed for augmented reality, gaming, virtual shopping and real world measurements. This could feed into iOS. Apple has already introduced a level of gesture control into iOS 7, as a way of controlling apps using head movements, though early experiences have not been positive. But it demonstrated how all the major mobile and media players will need to put effort into gesture controls.
Further M&A activity could also be foreseen. Sony kicked all this off with the success of its Eyetoy, and the company behind that, Canesta, was acquired back in 2010 by Microsoft. Qualcomm bought IPR from GestureTek back in 2011. And Intel was reported back in July to be interested in its own gesture control patents, and duly spent $40m buying Omek Interactive from under the noses of Samsung and Qualcomm. Omek provides gesture recognition technology for video games, consumer electronics and cars; and has a shorter range version called Grab for PCs. The firm has been merged into Intel’s perceptual computing division in Israel.
That is likely to spark a patent war too, since control of the key IPR that differentiates these important technologies will become a real competitive advantage, and potentially a way to slow down rivals. Apple could now use PrimeSense patents to put obstacles in the way of Android getting into gesture control, while Microsoft could once again become an arms dealer for the Android community, by selling access to its own Canesta patents, and providing some level of immunity from Apple, while ramping its global IPR revenues. This was the tactic it took in mobile OSs, and it is thought to have acquired over 50 patents when it bought Canesta, while also holding some 250 relevant patents filed by its own staff.