14 MACWORLD APRIL 2020
MACUSER A PEEK AT APPLE’S RECENT ACQUISITIONSrare peek behind the curtain. Apple CEO
Tim Cook said not long ago that the
company makes an acquisition every two
to three weeks, and not even all of those
make it into the public eye. So let’s take a
look at the firms that we do know Apple
has acquired recently and see what we
can glean.
ALWAYS IN MOTION CAPTURE
IS THE FUTURE
Back in October of last year, Apple quietly
picked up IKinema Ltd., a company based
in the UK that specializes in motion
capture technology. That tech is the kind
of thing that’s used in movies, TV, and
video games to collect information about
how a person or animal moves and then
map it onto a virtual model. (Whenever you
see behind-the-scenes images of people
wearing those wacky suits, or little dots
glued to their face, you’re seeing motion
capture technology at work.)
Is Apple building out a special effects
house for its burgeoning TV and film
production arm? Not particularly likely. But
this also isn’t the first motion-capture
related company that Apple has bought.
Way back in 2015, it acquired Faceshift, a
company that used technology to capture
facial expressions and translate them onto
digital avatars—technology that likely did
become Animoji/Memoji.
While it seems somewhat unlikely that
Apple would buy an entire company
simply in order to make those animations a
little more accurate, what if IKinema will
help extend that feature beyond just facial
expressions and into the rest of the body
as well? It wouldn’t surprise me to see
Apple at work on a digital avatar system
that people could use to represent
themselves not only in FaceTime calls and
iMessages but perhaps even online.
(Especially if it doesn’t require you to wear
a weird suit or a bunch of dots.)THE BLEEDING EDGE OF
PHOTOGRAPHY
Maybe Apple had some sort of “buy one
UK company, get one UK company free”
deal going: in December, it acquired
Spectral Edge, a startup also based in
Great Britain, which specializes in
computational photography. In particular,
Spectral Edge’s tech combined images
taken from traditional cameras along with
images from infrared cameras to create
better quality photos. This approach
seems to produce images with richer colors
that look closer to what you see in real life.
It’s absolutely no surprise that Apple
would buy a company that could help
improve its photos. After all, cameras are
the biggest selling point of most
smartphones these days, and that’s where
the competition between Apple and its
rivals is the most intense.