Hardware/software collaboration aims to accelerate adoption of gesture control in TVs and PCs
DALLAS – Dec. 27, 2012 – Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) (NASDAQ: TXN) today announced it is collaborating with SoftKinetic®, a leading provider of end-to-end 3D sensor and gesture recognition middleware solutions, to grow adoption of gesture control in televisions (TVs), personal computers (PCs), and a wide variety of other consumer and industrial devices. At the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), TI will demonstrate its new 3D time-of-flight (ToF) image sensor chipset, which integrates SoftKinetic’s DepthSense® pixel technology and runs SoftKinetic’s iisu® middleware for finger, hand and full-body tracking. The TI chipset is inside 3D cameras that control a laptop and a smart TV to access and navigate movies, games and other content with the wave of a hand. The TV demonstration also features TI’s OMAP™ 5 processor, which powers an impressive natural user interface with robust gesture recognition and full-HD graphics.
Both demonstrations will be showcased at CES 2013 in the TI Village, North Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. “SoftKinetic has long believed that motion control and gesture recognition is the future of user interfaces and digital interactivity,” said Michel Tombroff, chief executive officer of SoftKinetic. “We are pleased to collaborate with TI to help bring this technology into the mass market, and look forward to having our technology impact the everyday lives of consumers.”
Current 3D gesture recognition solutions lack real-time tracking and suffer from poor sensitivity, which can cause sluggish performance. TI’s ToF chipset, featuring a 3D sensor employing SoftKinetic’s DepthSense pixel technology, overcomes this problem to deliver high sensitivity and the real-time motion tracking responsiveness consumers expect. The TI and SoftKinetic solution enables precise tracking of finger, hand and full-body gestures. TI plans to follow its initial products with a complete portfolio of solutions suitable for various applications and form factors. For more information and to see a laptop demonstration video, visit www.ti.com/3dtof-pr.
“There are a plethora of applications that can benefit from the accuracy and resolution of this technology,” said Gaurang Shah, vice president of Audio and Imaging Products at TI. “Imagine an end equipment designer tilting, rotating, compressing and expanding a new product in 3D to inspect and evaluate it on their PC before committing to a hardware prototype. We believe our collaboration with SoftKinetic will ignite more applications like this, and foster further technology innovation to simplify the way we interact with machines.”
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About Innovation at TI
For more than 80 years, TI has been at the forefront of technical innovation, enabling customers to differentiate products with higher integration, faster speeds and lower power. Today, we are engineering the future with advances in energy harvesting, power management, cloud computing, safety and security, health technology, and more. Learn more about how TI’s Analog and Embedded Processing products are improving how we live, work and play, today and well into the future, at www.ti.com/innovation.
About Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments semiconductor innovations help 90,000 customers unlock the possibilities of the world as it could be – smarter, safer, greener, healthier and more fun. Our commitment to building a better future is ingrained in everything we do – from the responsible manufacturing of our semiconductors, to caring for our employees, to giving back inside our communities. This is just the beginning of our story. Learn more at http://www.ti.com.
Trademarks
OMAP is a trademark of Texas Instruments. All other trademarks and registered trademarks belong to their respective owners.
About SoftKinetic
SoftKinetic’s vision is to give everyone the freedom to control, explore and enjoy the entire digital world through the most natural and intuitive user interfaces and machine interactions. SoftKinetic is the leading provider of gesture-based platforms for the consumer electronics and professional markets. The company offers a complete family of 3D imaging and gesture recognition solutions, including patented 3D CMOS time-of-flight sensors and cameras (DepthSense™ family of products, formerly known as Optrima product family), multi-platform and multi-camera 3D gesture recognition middleware and tools (iisu™ family of products) as well as games and applications from SoftKinetic Studios.
With over 8 years of R&D on both hardware and software, SoftKinetic solutions have already been successfully used in the field of interactive digital entertainment, consumer electronics, health care and other professional markets (such as digital signage and medical systems). SoftKinetic, iisu, DepthSense and The Interface Is You are trade names or registered trademarks of SoftKinetic.
Official Website | @SoftKinetic | YouTube
Media Contacts
Mark Alden, Texas Instruments
mark.alden@ti.com +1.408.721.6929
Vicky Smithee, GolinHarris for Texas Instruments
vsmithee@golinharris.com +1.972.341.2537
Andrew Karl, TriplePoint for SoftKinetic
softkinetic@triplepointpr.com +1.415.955.8500
Alyx Evans 
Kaitlyn Red Wing