PrimeSense was an Israeli 3D sensing company based in Tel Aviv. PrimeSense had offices in Israel, North America, Japan, Singapore, Korea, China and Taiwan. PrimeSense was bought by Apple Inc. for $360 million on November 24, 2013. History PrimeSense was a fabless semiconductor company and provided products in the area of sensory inputs for consumer and commercial markets. PrimeSense's technology had been originally applied to gaming but was later applied in other fields. PrimeSense was best known for licensing the hardware design and chip used in Microsoft's Kinect motion-sensing system for the Xbox 360 in 2010. The company had been founded in 2005 to explore depth-sensing cameras which they had demonstrated to developers at the 2006 Game Developers Conference. Microsoft had been looking on its own at 3D camera technology applications to its Xbox line of consoles, and engaged with PrimeSense after the conference to help establish the direction the technology needed to go to make it into consumer-grade products, while Microsoft improved on additional software aspects and incorporated machine learning to help with motion detection. On November 24, 2013, Apple Inc. confirmed the purchase of PrimeSense for $360 million. Technology Light coding technology PrimeSense's depth acquisition was enabled by "light coding" technology. The process coded the scene with near-IR light, light that returns distorted depending upon where things are (Structured light). The solution then used a standard off-the-shelf CMOS image sensor to read the coded light back from the scene using various algorithms to triangulate and extract the 3D data. The product analysed scenery in 3 dimensions with software, so that devices could interact with users. Products PrimeSense system on a chip (SoC) The CMOS image sensor worked with the visible video sensor to enable the depth map provided by PrimeSense SoC's Carmine (PS1080) and Capri (PS1200) to be merged with the color image. The SoCs performed a registration process so the color image (RGB) and depth (D) information was aligned properly. The light coding infrared patterns were deciphered in order to produce a VGA size depth image of a scene. It delivered visible video, depth, and audio information in a synchronized fashion via the USB 2.0 interface. The SoC had minimal CPU requirements as all depth acquisition algorithms ran on the SoC itself. PrimeSense sensors Carmine 1.08 Carmine 1.09 (short range) Capri 1.25 (embedded) PrimeSense embedded its technology in its own sensors, the Carmine 1.08 and Carmine 1.09.