Microsoft is bolstering its position in the gesture recognition market with the acquisition of Canesta, a small silicon valley company that specialises in natural user interfaces. The purchase indicates how central gesture recognition is becoming to interfaces for AV and IT equipment. No details of the agreement have been disclosed but the acquisition is expected to be completed before the end of the year.
Canesta’s technology is based on 3D sensing expertise that allows intuitive control of devices with body movements.
Jim Spare, president and CEO of Canesta, said the agreement was exciting news for the whole industry. “There is little question that within the next decade we will see natural user interfaces become common for input across all devices,” he added. “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 has 44 patents granted to date and claims dozens more on file. The company has been at the forefront of many areas critical to enabling natural user interfaces broadly across many platforms. Some of these include the invention of standard CMOS 3-D sensing pixels, fundamental innovations in semiconductor device physics, mixed-signal IC chip design, optics, signal processing algorithms, and computer vision software.