Earlier this week Apple announced that it is buying PrimeSense, an Israel-based gesture-tech company for $350 million, and, in typical Apple fashion, refused to reveal why.
Ever since, the blogosphere has been rife with speculation.

Now it’s our turn. It’s time for The Daily Spread to take a look at this acquisition to see if we can make any sense of it. Let’s start with PrimeSense. The Israeli startup is famous (in certain circles) for providing the backbone technology that drives Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect gaming system.

Kinect allows gamers to use their bodies to control the onscreen interactions between game characters and their environment. The same technology is employed in fields as diverse as robotics and remote health monitoring.

OK. So that’s the background. Could it be that Apple is looking to dominate gesture-technology, just as it did with voice and swipe? Paul Saffo, the man in charge of predicting the future at Discern Inc. thinks so.

“Devices are getting too small to fit a keyboard and they are becoming too much a part of our lives for us to stop and touch them. We can either converse with them or gesture at them.”
And as wearable devices begin to replace tablets and smartphones, it is hard to argue.

“Gesturing”, say Saffo, “is the next mouse. Interacting with our machines will become more and more like interaction with other humans. We will talk to them and make gestures at them.”

So, there you have it. It looks like Apple is taking wearable technology very seriously and considers gesture technology to be fundamental to its success. Fascinating stuff and pure conjecture, of course. The only thing that is certain is that we are all going to look really, really stupid at some point in the very near future.