“Like Apple’s patents, it is sometimes easy, I think, to read too much into some of the company’s acquisitions. Sure, it doesn’t go around acquiring companies randomly, but it may not always be after the complete package.

“But in this particular case, there is reason to suspect that Apple does have an interest in the broad brush-strokes of what Faceshift does.” 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,” Lovejoy writes. Lovejoy writes, “If it could make face-recognition as reliable as Touch ID, that would be even more convenient: unlock your device just by picking it up (or opening the lid of a MacBook). No need to hold your iPhone awkwardly when making Apple Pay purchases – so long as the camera can see your face, it authorizes them automatically.”Īnd PhotoBooth on steroids, too, of course!Īpple acquires ‘Star Wars’ contributor Faceshift – November 25, 2015Īpple has purchased facial motion-capture company FaceShift – SeptemAuthorize iTunes purchases without doing a thing, simply because you’re already looking at the screen and it knows who you are. This is close to what I’d picture from this acquisition. Faceshift doubtlessly has some private frameworks for compositing that could be valuable for game APIs.Here are some other possibilities that come to mind: I can say definitively that Apple NEVER does acquisitions for products it doesn’t know what to do with but it does do acquihires, so of course they may have just been acquiring a brilliant team that knows a lot about 3D and OpenGL and compositing and so on.

Apple may be building up a trove of IP for Apple TV and iOS game developers.

Faceshift studio kinect