“Apple is in early negotiations to buy Israel-based PrimeSense, a developer of chips that enable three-dimensional machine vision, for $280 million, the Calcalist new website said on Tuesday,” Reuters reports.
“A delegation of Apple engineering executives visited PrimeSense in early July, Calcalist said,” Reuters reports. “PrimeSense’s sensing technology, which gives digital devices the ability to observe a scene in three dimensions, was used to help power Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect.”
Read more in the full article here.
Better find out who owns all those patents! (or who THINKS they own all those patents).
Would this let Apple cut off chips for the Xbox?
No. microsofts IP Is theirs.
What it would do for Apple is: “hey guys, now that you did version 1 for Microsoft, can you build us one? Now that you know what you would do differently?”
This plus Leap. 😛
IF it’s Microsoft’s IP.
Revenge for Microsoft buying Bungie away from Apple.
Ironically Apple was offered the Connect technology before Microsoft, but turned it down.
Steve Jobs “turned it down”.
Steve Jobs also turned down Schiller’s offer to buy Bungie.
He said no, until he found out Microsoft was the other bidder, then changed his mind but eventually lost out because he secretly hated games.
He was wrong about games. He was wrong in deferring to third-parties to provide platform cohesiveness.
The USB interface for Mac games SUCKS EGGS! Controllers are crapware PC products that can’t perform on Macintosh without third-party support.
Now that he’s gone, perhaps Apple will embrace games, (and a lot more) in a more fundamental way.
Only likely on iOS, though. I don’t see Apple making a big game push on the Mac.
You don’t know your Apple history do you?
Steve Jobs turned down the Bungie offer. Then he’d heard Microsoft was the “other” party and he couldn’t move heaven and earth to stop that purchase.
Steve Jobs lost that one and when he sneezes, we catch cold.
USB interface for game controllers is much worse on Windows these days. Not sure how they’ve done it, but Microsoft has been getting new PC games to gut support for all third party game controllers except for the Xbox controllers (which work with with PC). You use to be able to use any third party controller and map the buttons however you want – but every PC game I’ve tried made in last couple years ignore my USB game controllers, and only present control options for keyboard and mouse or Xbox controllers.
Not only do I believe what you wrote, but I also believe Microsoft is at the bottom of it all.
Ironically, my wireless xbox controller and Microsoft Xbox 360 Wireless Receiver for Windows, is the best performing controller I own and I’ve bought them all.
I even own a PS3 wired controller because it works on some Mac games but not all recognize it.
Borderlands sucks with any controller I own! As does the Assassin’s Creed series. My hope is, someone will find a way to use our iDevices as controllers for Mac games.
Nice!