Apple's big gesture - Apple buys PrimeSense

After a long time of rumors and leaks, it's confirmed that Apple is acquiring gesture recognition company PrimeSense.

For those who don't know, it was PrimeSense's technology that powered Microsoft's original XBox (then Kinect) gesture-based gaming console. We predicted Apple's acquiring a gesture recognition company months ago, but expected that it would be one of the smaller companies.

This acquisition is the latest is a series of acquisitions in the gesture recognition area. Google acquired Flutter, Intel acquired Omek Interactive and Qualcomm acquired GestureTek. In addition, Samsung has released gesture recognition of some of their latest phones and TVs, and many other companies are researching the area.

We're most excited by software approaches to gesture recognition, especially micro-gestures. But Apple's acquisition of PrimeSense shows their choice of a hardware solution.

The $256,000 question, of course, is what Apple is planning to do with PrimeSense's technology. Many are speculating that they'll incorporate it into a new Apple TV product, noting that an iOS-based TV would essentially enter the gaming market at the same time. Others are speculating that it will be incorporated into Apple's laptop computer line, a similar direction as the technology by Leap Motion that is incorporated into laptops by HP.

We believe, however, that it's more likely that Apple will try to use the PrimeSense sensor to further differentiate its iOS devices. For example, Apple recently introduced its famous fingerprint sensor in iPhones. These sensors can be used for device security and for transaction security, but more importantly they can be used by 3rd-party applications for any authentication or security purpose. Motion sensors in iDevices could serve to control the device's scrolling and selection, but more importantly, could open up a wide variety of innovative applications. Innovative apps are, as we all know, the differentiation that Apple craves for iDevices.

Could a PrimeSense sensor in an iDevice detect when a car got too close to another car? Detect the height and gender of someone approaching a wall-mounted iPad? Detect facial contours well enough to recognize faces? Perform therapeutic gait analysis by sensing leg and body motion? Detect when people are drunk?

The possibilities appear endless for applications of PrimeSense sensors in iDevices.

Intel demos indoor location technology in new Wi-Fi chips at MWC 2015

Intel made several announcements at MWC 2015, including a new chipset for wireless connectivity (Wi-Fi) in mobile devices. This new chipset, the 8270, include in-chip support for indoor location positioning. Below we explain their technology and show a video of it in action. With this announcement, Intel joins Broadcom, Qualcomm and other chip makers in moving broad indoor location positioning into mobile device hardware. The transition of indoor location positioning into chips is a trend identified in the newest Grizzly Analytics report on Indoor Location Positioning Technologies , released the week before MWC 2015. By moving indoor location positioning from software into hardware, chips such as Intel's enable location positioning to run continuously and universally, without using device CPU, and with less power consumption. Intel's technology delivers 1-3 meter accuracy, using a technique called multilateration, generating a new location estimate every second. While 1-

The year indoor location will truly take off

For years I've been writing sentences like "this will be the year that indoor location will explode into the market." I, and many others, have been expecting indoor location technology to enable the huge range of location-enabled apps, which currently work only outside where GPS signals are available, to work inside. But until now the promise of indoor location has remained a promise. But if we look at the reasons for this, we'll see that it is about to change. 2017 and 2018 are poised to be the years that the challenges keeping indoor location from going mainstream will be solved. First is accuracy. Most indoor location technologies until a year or so ago had accuracy in the range of 4 to 8 meters. This sounds good in principle, and in fact is better than GPS in many cases. But GPS systems are able to use road details to hide their inaccuracies, so that the blue dot seems to follow your driving car almost perfectly. But indoors, this sort of inaccuracy means y

Waze and Google Maps: A Quick Comparison

I've been a big Waze fan for years, relying on it to make my daily commute as quick as possible. I try to never leave my hometown without checking Waze first to avoid getting stuck in traffic. For those of you who don't know about Waze, they basically crowd-source traffic information, learning where traffic is slow by measuring how fast their users are moving. This traffic information is then used to route people in ways that will truly be fastest. (Apple has reportedly licensed Waze data for their upcoming maps app.) Waze is used most heavily abroad, and is only recently building a following in the States. (It was also just reviewed on the Forbes site .) So on a recent trip to the States, I decided to compare Waze to the latest USA-based version of Google Maps for Android. In a nutshell, I reached three conclusions. (1) Google's use of text-to-speech in their turn-by-turn directions is very nice. (2) Google's got Waze beat in terms of explaining what

Grizzly Analytics Blog

Search This Blog