SUNNYVALE, CA /BUSINESS WIRE/ -- Canesta Inc. announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to have its products, technology, intellectual property, customer contracts, and other resources acquired by the Microsoft Corp. Canesta is a leader in 3D sensing technology, which is critical to making natural user interfaces (NUI) possible.
According to Jim Spare, Canesta President and CEO, "This is very exciting news for the industry. There is little question that within the next decade we will see natural user interfaces become common for input across all devices. 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 is the inventor of a leading single-chip 3D sensing technology platform and a large body of intellectual property. With 44 patents granted to date and dozens more on file, the company has made breakthroughs in many areas critical to enabling NUIs broadly across many platforms. Some of these include the invention of standard CMOS 3D sensing pixels, fundamental innovations in semiconductor device physics, mixed-signal IC chip design, optics, signal processing algorithms, and computer vision software.
No details of the agreement have been disclosed. The acquisition is expected to be completed before the end of this year.
About Canesta
Canesta is the inventor of revolutionary, low-cost electronic perception technology and a leading provider of single-chip CMOS 3D sensors that fundamentally change the relationship between devices and their users. This capability makes possible true 3D perception as input to everyday devices, rather than the widely understood 3D representational technologies as output. Canesta's 3D input technology, based upon tiny, CMOS 3D imaging chips, or sensors, enables fine-grained, 3D depth perception in a wide range of applications. Products based on this capability can then react on sight to the actions or motions of individuals and objects in their field of view, gaining levels of functionality and ease of use that were simply not possible in an era when such devices were blind. Canesta's focus is on mass-market consumer electronics, but many applications exist in other markets as well. Canesta is located in Sunnyvale, CA. The company has filed in excess of 50 patents, 44 of which have been granted so far.