Omek Interactive was a venture-backed technology company developing advanced motion sensing software for
human-computer interaction. Omek was co-founded in 2007 by Janine Kutliroff and Gershom Kutliroff.
Company overview
Omek Interactive, Ltd. provides tools and technology for incorporating gesture recognition and body tracking capabilities into devices and applications. The Company's technology converts the raw depth map data from 3D cameras into commands that control hardware or software, enabling device manufacturers and application developers to create gesture and body tracking interfaces.
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 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 implement c ...
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 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 or time of fli ...
,
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.
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 technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, that designs and manufactures semiconductors and various integrated circuits, which it sells to electronics designers and manufacturers globa ...
’
BeagleBoard
The BeagleBoard is a low-power open-source single-board computer produced by Texas Instruments in association with Digi-Key and Newark element14. The BeagleBoard was also designed with open source software development in mind, and as a way of de ...
-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
*
Computer vision
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