Microsoft this week bought Canesta, the company which provided the gesture control technology behind the Sony Eyetoy ‘ and immediately set the gaming community arguing over whether it was to stop Sony from having access to the technology or because its own Kinect ‘Project Natal’ is still rough around the edges.
We saw the Project Natal people, Israeli firm Primesense, at IBC in September and have to say we were unimpressed. The team presenting it kept going on about how nothing else operated the way the Primesense technology did. Most rivals, they said, simply measured the time it took light to bounce off other objects in order to work out distance. What the Primesense system does is send different codes out within an IR light source and detect these codes when they return. In this way it creates a 3D image map of the entire room and how far away each thing is in it. The software running on a specialist chip can then tracks these objects.
It is in this way that Primesense says that its system can identify a particular person’s hand and then respond to the gestures it makes. To take control of a TV set on a demo which Primsense had at IBC, a person simply put their hand up and rapidly ‘pushed’ it forward. Control was then put with that hand and a simple flipping movement would change channels up and down.
Our over-riding impression was that the technology did not work well enough and we can’t help believe that Microsoft is buying the rival company, just as it has bought other similar companies in the past, as insurance against the failure of Kinect to remain popular. Kinect is the Primesense technology embedded into Xbox games and into controlling the TV the Xbox is connected to, and it is expected to sell in droves when it is launched later this week. But if word gets out that the gestures are a little clumsy, that people walking in front of your hand can ruin the control experience, or that games lack the level of accuracy for hand eye ball co-ordination, then Kinect could flop. It does come with voice commands as well as gesture commands, and these look overwhelmingly more convincing than gestures when seen in demos. Telling your Xbox to ‘Play’ seems less incongruous than waving your hand frantically in the air at no-one.
It’s our guess that Microsoft will embed some form of this gesture control software into set tops within its Mediaroom IPTV division, and may want to do this with technology that it owns, rather than the Primesense technology which it has to pay royalties on. On the other hand it may feel that the entire gesture control landscape is in its infancy and this may be merely a landgrab.
In which case we are at the beginning of gesture control as a technology and Microsoft is now hoarding patents ‘ it doesn’t matter if the Primesense chip is foolproof or not, the combination of how it handles depth perception, when perhaps allied with some of the other approaches, from other specialists like Canesta and 3DV, which Microsoft acquired just over a year ago, might give Microsoft a global lead in the technology. At the time it was thought that 3DV technology would find itself added to the Primesense technology in Kinect, but Primesense insisted publicly and loudly that this was not the case.
Now Microsoft has acquire Canesta and appears to have a stranglehold on depth perception and gesture control patents ‘ some 250 are thought to have been filed by Microsoft and the companies that it has bought. It acquired the Canesta products, technology, intellectual property and customer contracts and while we know its technology was used in the now almost obsolete Eyetoy, it is unclear if the company had any involvement in the new Sony Move Motion Controller.
Microsoft has already said that it expects to sell 3 million Kinect devices in the run up to Christmas once it comes out, and has sold out of its pre-order allocation . Sony has also said that it has already sold 1.5 million of the Sony Move in Europe since its launch a few weeks back.
Both the Sony Move and Kinect products are expected to reduce sales of the once highly popular, but now waning Nintendo Wii with its original motion controller.
Jim Spare, Canesta president and CEO said, ‘This is very exciting news for the industry. There is little question that within the next decade we will see natural user interfaces become common for input across all devices. With Microsoft’s breadth of scope from enterprise to consumer products, market presence, and commitment to NUI, we are confident that our technology will see wide adoption across many applications that embody the full potential of the technology.’
Canesta, similar to Primesense, invented a single chip 3-D sensing platform plus 44 patents granted to date and more applied for, and has 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.
No details of the agreement have been disclosed. The acquisition is expected to be completed before the end of this year. But Canesta had four rounds of funding, totaling over $60 million, so it is sure to be well in excess of that.