But I do think the lengthy upgrade cycle is likely to have given Apple pause: it’s something that has already impacted iPad sales.īut this doesn’t rule out TV use, of course. Apple does already make a television, it just asks customers to buy their own displays. I don’t necessarily buy the low-margin argument – you could say exactly the same about PCs or smartphones, both areas in which Apple still manages to make a lot of money. Perhaps we’d use a hand gesture to scroll through content and point to what we wanted, for example.Īpple reportedly abandoned its full TV set plans when it couldn’t see a way to make enough money from it. It was suggested at the time that there were two reasons for that: TVs typically have low margins, and people keep them for a long time, so the upgrade cycle is long. In the days when Apple was believed to be working on its own television – rather than just the Apple TV box – there were long-standing rumors that Apple was planning some kind of gesture-based UI. Some years back, we thought we had a pretty good idea. So it’s clear that Apple has significant interest somewhere in the facial recognition/motion-sensing field, the question is: why? I can see six possibilities. As we noted earlier, Apple bought PrimeSense back in 2013, the company behind the technology used in Microsoft’s Kinect sensor, and facial recognition company Polar Rose way back in 2010. That reason is that this is not a single acquisition in isolation. It may well be that there is some small element of the company’s technology that Apple wants, or it may be an acquihire – where it’s the engineers rather than the specific tech the company wants.īut in this particular case, there is reason to suspect that Apple does have an interest in the broad brush-strokes of what Faceshift does …

Sure, it doesn’t go around acquiring companies randomly, but it may not always be after the complete package. Like Apple’s patents, it is sometimes easy, I think, to read too much into some of the company’s acquisitions. Not too long after the first rumors surfaced, Apple has given its usual non-confirmation that it has acquired Faceshift, the company behind the technology Star Wars used to animate the faces of CGI characters. It’s not an obvious fit for Apple, so what could be the thinking behind the purchase?

Faceshift 2015