PrimeSense and Kinect

On 4 November 2010 Microsoft launched Kinect for the Xbox 360, a camera that let players control games with their whole bodies, without any controller. Its depth-sensing heart came from PrimeSense, a Tel Aviv company founded in 2005 by Aviad Maizels, Alexander Shpunt and their partners. Their "light coding" projected an invisible pattern of near-infrared light onto the room and read its distortion with an ordinary CMOS image sensor, and their own chip triangulated the distance of every point to produce a depth map in real time. PrimeSense showed the camera to developers at the 2006 Game Developers Conference, and Microsoft built Kinect around it. Kinect sold eight million units in its first 60 days, a Guinness record for the fastest-selling consumer electronics device.

Researchers and hobbyists soon used the cheap sensor for robots, 3D scanning and physical therapy. In November 2013 Apple bought PrimeSense for about 360 million dollars, and its depth-sensing work lives on in the TrueDepth camera behind the iPhone's Face ID, introduced in 2017.