PrimeSense

Sensing that recognizes the body

PrimeSense was founded in 2005 by Aviad Maizels, Alexander Shpunt, Dmitri Rais, Ophir Sharon and Tamir Berliner. Inon Beracha joined early on as CEO, according to Globes. The company developed a combination of sensors, chips and software that lets a device recognize objects and movements in three-dimensional space. It operated in Tel Aviv and sold technology that could be built into other manufacturers' devices. The goal was to turn body movement into information a computer can process: a person waves a hand or changes position, and the system measures the action and lets an application respond. The product that connected it to a wide audience was Microsoft's Kinect.

What the sensor added to the camera

An ordinary camera shows a flat image of what is in front of it. A 3D sensing system adds information about depth and about where objects are in space. PrimeSense combined hardware and software components to turn measuring space into information an application can use. According to articles in Calcalist and People and Computers, this ability made it possible to follow the user's body and translate movements into interface commands. In a game, for example, the player's movement can replace an action on a handheld controller. The same sensing ability can also be used to scan objects and measure a room, but the actual use depends on the device and the software the manufacturer builds around the sensor.

Milestone: Kinect

Microsoft built PrimeSense technology into the Kinect for the Xbox 360 console, released in 2010. Calcalist described the system as a way to control games with the body, without a physical controller. According to Guinness World Records, Kinect sold about 8 million units in its first 60 days on the market, between 4 November 2010 and 3 January 2011, and was recognized as the fastest-selling consumer electronics device up to that time. In May 2011, Microsoft reported that it had sold more than ten million Kinect units. The technology thus became a part of a consumer product that entered homes around the world. Kinect recognized the player's pose from the depth image alone, without markers on the body, which made it an early home use of markerless motion capture; Microsoft researchers described the algorithm for recognizing body parts in a paper that won the best paper award at the CVPR conference in 2011. For the Xbox One generation, Microsoft developed a different sensing technology; the historical link to PrimeSense refers to the Xbox 360 Kinect, not to every product that carried the Kinect name.

The acquisition by Apple

In November 2013, Apple confirmed the acquisition of PrimeSense. According to People and Computers on 25 November, an Apple spokeswoman confirmed the deal and declined to give details of its goals and plans. Apple did not publish the price of the deal; according to reports in Calcalist and People and Computers, the price was about $350 million, and Globes cited a figure of $345 million in 2019. The company stopped operating as an independent sensor company, and the team joined Apple's development work. At the time of the sale, Calcalist reported that all 150 of the company's employees were expected to stay and keep working from its offices in Tel Aviv.

Legacy

In a 2019 review, Globes reported that PrimeSense employees and Alexander Shpunt are named on Apple patents in augmented reality, and that the team was combined with employees Apple took on from Texas Instruments. Tamir Berliner took a different path: in 2015 he was appointed to lead Magic Leap's Israeli development center, according to a Calcalist interview. PrimeSense shows one way in which sensing space and movement went from a component supplier's technology to part of a consumer interface. Its legacy includes the use in Kinect and the continued development work of the company's people, even after the independent brand name disappeared.