Omek Interactive was a venture-backed technology company developing advanced motion-sensing software for
human-computer interaction in automobiles, casinos and arcades, consumer electronics, video games, health care and digital signage. Omek was co-founded in 2006 by Janine Kutliroff and Gershom Kutliroff.
Company overview
Omek Interactive is an Israeli company that develops gesture recognition and motion tracking software for use in combination with 3D depth sensor cameras. Omek’s
middleware
Middleware is a type of computer software program that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as "software glue".
Middleware makes it easier for software developers to imple ...
is sensor-independent, supporting multiple cameras including those based on a
Structured light and
Time-of-flight camera
A time-of-flight camera (ToF camera), also known as time-of-flight sensor (ToF sensor), is a range imaging camera system for measuring distances between the camera and the subject for each point of the image based on time-of-flight, the round ...
technology. Omek's software works with the following cameras:
PrimeSense
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
Pri ...
-based
Microsoft Kinect
Kinect is a discontinued line of motion sensing input devices produced by Microsoft and first released in 2010. The devices generally contain RGB cameras, and infrared projectors and detectors that map depth through either structured light o ...
,
PMD Technologies CamCube,
SoftKinetic DepthSense, and Panasonic D-Imager.
In July 2011 Intel Capital led their Round C financing with $7 million. Among the investors was Eliyahu Haddad who invested $2 million. Mr. Haddad was also given a seat on the Board.
Intel confirmed, that it acquired Omek July 16, 2013 for $40 million.
Technology
Omek’s flagship product is the Beckon Development Suite,
which converts raw depth data from 3D cameras and turns it into intelligence about humans in the scene, through
background subtraction, joints tracking, skeleton identification, and gesture recognition. The Beckon software solution includes the Gesture Authoring Tool,
a machine learning tool that enables developers to create gestures without writing any code. Beckon is no longer available as a free, non-commercial download from the Omek website.
In March 2012, at the Embedded Vision Alliance Summit,
Omek announced the upcoming availability of their ''Grasp'' Development Suite.
Grasp focuses on close-range, hand and finger tracking and gesture recognition at distances of 1 meter and less. At the same event Omek also announced support for
Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American multinational semiconductor company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. It is one of the top 10 semiconductor companies worldwide based on sales volume. The company's focus is on developing analog ...
’
BeagleBoard-xM evaluation board, a low-cost, low-power, embedded computing platform.
See also
*
Natural user interface
In computing, a natural user interface (NUI) or natural interface is a user interface that is effectively invisible, and remains invisible as the user continuously learns increasingly complex interactions. The word "natural" is used because most c ...
*
Human-computer interaction
*
Gesture recognition
Gesture recognition is an area of research and development in computer science and language technology concerned with the recognition and interpretation of human gestures. A subdiscipline of computer vision, it employs mathematical algorithms to ...
*
Computer vision
Computer vision tasks include methods for image sensor, acquiring, Image processing, processing, Image analysis, analyzing, and understanding digital images, and extraction of high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical ...
References
{{Reflist
External links
Official Website*See Chapter 7: Application Development with the
mekBeckon Framewor
"Meet the Kinect: An Introduction to Programming Natural User Interfaces", by Sean Kean, Jonathan Hall, Phoenix Perry
Gesture recognition
Commercial computer vision systems
Human–computer interaction researchers
Software companies of Israel
Intel acquisitions