Microsoft Corp. and PrimeSense, a company developing 3D-sensing and recognition technologies, announced on Wednesday that PrimeSense will be providing its technology for use in the Project Natal motion sensor for Xbox 360.
“We have seen tremendous excitement and anticipation for the arrival of ‘Project Natal’ this holiday. PrimeSense has delivered an important component to the technology, helping us deliver revolutionary controller-free entertainment experiences in the living room,” said Ilan Spillinger, vice president of Xbox 360 hardware.
PrimeSense’s product portfolio contains the PrimeSensor reference design; PrimeSense system-on-chip’ which acts as the backend SoC for the entire system as well as a 3D data generation unit; optical element and NITE processing middleware. It is unclear which technology Microsoft has licensed from the Tel Aviv, Israel-based company since PrimeSense only claims about reference design, but not remains tight-lipped about its components. Earlier this year Microsoft said that Natal will not feature its own processor, hence it is unclear whether the unit actually features PrimeSense’s SoC.
“Xbox 360 hardware engineering teams developed the Project Natal sensor based on the PrimeSensor reference design to support the special requirements of Project Natal,” said Aviad Maizels, president and founder of PrimeSense.
It is interesting to note that PrimeSense’s technology resembles a similar gesture based control tech developed by another Israeli company called 3DV Systems.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Tags: Microsoft, Natal, Xbox, PrimeSense
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Discussion started: 04/04/10 02:07:06 PM
Latest comment: 04/04/10 02:07:06 PM
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Licensing a complete SoC and 3D data generation unit package makes sense. Compute intensive tasks like 3D mapping and recognizing faces is best left to independent subsystem that just sends its findings through Natal API to main system's applications making use of Natal data at that moment. Question is if it's financially viable in the long run or is such system considered too expensive to manufacture for Natal to fall within MS's predicted/announced price (IIRC around $60 MSRP?)? I sure wouldn't like it being just main system's CPU dependent, think of what it's already supposed to compute when Natal would also be at its heaviest use. If they're capable of making it a smooth end-user experience, it should cover some costs in higher sales of the whole Xbox + Natal package.
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Posted by: MyK
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Date: 04/04/10 02:07:06 PM]
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