Intel is hatching plans to acquire Israeli gesture recognition and tracking technology firm Omek Interactive, three people close to the matter said.

Competitors Qualcomm and Samsung are also considering making an offer — although one source said that a bidding war for Omek is unlikely.

For these companies, gesture control technology is attractive as it offers a way to simplify increasingly sophisticated devices, draw customers to cool sci-fi-like devices, and chew up a lot of computing power that can be produced by their future chips.

“I know that Qualcomm and Samsung are in for natural user interface and biometrics,” said Motti Vaknin, a partner at Israeli venture firm Cedar Fund. By “in,” he refers to partnership, investment, and acquisition opportunities. Intel is currently partnered with competing startup SoftKinetic, and its investment arm Intel Ventures led Omek’s first round of funding.

In July 2011, Omek — with its gesture tracking and recognition technology — raised $7 million. A spokesperson from Intel Capital declined to comment on the acquisition talks.

Omek needed to find another round of financing, so the timing on the bidding isn’t surprising, according to one source familiar with the matter.

VentureBeat also reached out to Omek Interactive. CEO Janine Kutliroff said, “Omek is always having conversations of a strategic or financial nature. We never comment on rumors in the marketplace.”

Jim Moore, the founder of technology M&A firm J Moore Partners, said the intellectual property would be an asset to buyers. “In this case, using depth of field camera data for gesture input will allow people to control their computers without touching them,” he said. He continued, “It is [the] early days for this technology as the application builders will need to build this into their interface and functionality. But the possibilities are enormous.”

The race for ‘perceptual computing’

The race to pick up the technology reveals the hype and reality around cool new technologies that cross multiple markets. Gesture controls have been hot in games since Nintendo debuted the Wii motion-sensing game console in 2006. The Japanese company sold more than 100 million systems, beating out Microsoft and Sony, who were taken by surprise by the popularity of the new ways to control games.

Microsoft bought several companies in response and debuted its rival technology, Kinect, with great success in 2010. Sony followed, less successfully, with its PlayStation Move controller. But it continues to invest in its EyeToy camera-based technology. Microsoft clearly tried to lock up the intellectual property for motion-sensing technology, but it still bought commercial chips from PrimeSense when it shipped Kinect.

While the technologies succeeded in the game market, players cried out for better gesture recognition. Kinect couldn’t detect movements that were too close to it or too far away. A distance of about 10 feet is the sweet spot. Newer technologies can detect subtle finger movements and motions that are inches away from the screen. Intel is particularly interested in such technology for the PC.

As the world’s biggest chip maker, Intel’s focused on “perceptual computing,” or technologies for controlling a computer or tablet that include voice recognition, face recognition, eye-tracking, and motion sensing. Qualcomm and Samsung, likewise, also want to bring such technologies to their mobile markets.

Along the way, the hype cycle has grown as companies try to recapture the experience that Tom Cruise demonstrated with a gesture-controlled computer in the sci-fi film Minority Report. But consumers are likely to reject technologies that fall far short of this target. Omek’s early technology fits into this category, and marketers are still searching for the ideal markets for gesture-based controls.

Omek’s earlier focus was doing full-body motion-tracking systems, dubbed Beckon, that competed with Kinect. The idea was to enable gesture controls for movies or music playback, as Microsoft’s Kinect can also now do. But there wasn’t much of a market beyond Kinect.

PrimeSense showed new 3D cameras at the Consumer Electronics Show this year. These cameras featured much reduced costs so that the gesture controls could be taken into new markets such as tracking goods on retail shelves. Qualcomm has acquired its own technology for gesture control as well.

Now Omek is focused on a technology that it calls Grasp, which is the recognition of small finger movements at closer range. Omek is working with various Intel divisions on that technology, which could be part of the larger perceptual computing offering. In software, Omek’s rivals include Softkinetic, Pointgrab, and Eyesight. The latter use 2D webcams, rather than the more costly 3D space cameras.

Gestigon and LeapMotion are competitors in hand-movement recognition.

Check out the video below for a demonstration of Omek’s close-range gesture recognition tech.

This story is developing. We will update it as we learn more. 

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Leap Motion, the hotly-anticipated “Kinect for computers” motion control device, will start shipping to consumers on May 13 and will be available for purchase at Best Buy retail locations on May 19, the company announced this morning.

If you haven’t already pre-ordered, however, the price is now a little higher: $79.99, up $10 from the pre-order cost.

In addition, the Leap Motion app store now has a name, and still no release date but at least a general timeline. COO Andy Miller told me yesterday that the company’s app store will be known as Airspace, and that it will be opening in the very near future. Fifty-two thousand developers have applied for Leap Motion developer kits, and 12,000 have already been sent out.

“We’ll be opening our app store for submissions very soon,” Miller said. “People are submitting apps already, even before it’s open.”

Those apps include Disney’s Sugar Rush, a racing game from the Wreck-it Ralph movie, a paint-in-the-air app from Corel, and a “devil-stick two-hand music beat app” from well-regarded game studio Double Fine called Dischord, which will enable users to make music in space.

“There’s a whole new world of interesting apps out there letting you do things you couldn’t ever do before,” Miller said, adding that innovation beyond what is possible with a mouse and keyboard is part of Leap Motion’s criteria for allowing apps into Airspace. “I don’t think Airspace will be hundreds of thousands of apps, ever. It’s curated, and if an app doesn’t meet our standards, it won’t go in.”

One more app that announced its upcoming availability is Clear, the Mac to-do list. Here’s a quick video from RealMac, the company behind the software, showing what it can do:

Leap Motion says its hardware and software is up to 200 times more sensitive than existing motion-control technology and can track the movement of all 10 of your fingers in increments as small as 1/100th of a millimeter at up to 290 frames per second.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Leap Motion announced a ground-breaking partnership with ASUS this morning. With this deal, Leap will bundle its computer-controlling hand gesture technology with PCs direct from the manufacturer for the first time. And the company unveiled a new $30 million funding round from existing investors, including Founders Fund and Highland Capital Partners.

The partnership with ASUS will see the Leap, a device about the size of a pack of gum, bundled with select ASUS computers shipping this year. The Leap functions much as a Nintendo Wii or Xbox Kinect but is much more precise and sensitive, tracking movements of both hands and all 10 fingers at 290 frames per second and detecting movements as small as 1/100 of a millimeter.

I talked to Leap Motion’s president and chief operating officer, Andy Miller, about the announcements.

“We’re starting with all-in-ones and then moving to high-end laptops,” Miller said. “An all-in-one is just a great demonstration of our technology.”

Bundling the Leap with ASUS is just the beginning, Miller told me. The Leap adds physical gestures to the now-standard computer interface vocabulary of visuals, mice, keyboards, and touch, and “lots of other OEMs” are interested in the technology.

“Companies are interested in using Leap in laptops, tablets, robotic surgery … we’ve been contacted by thousands of places from fast-food places to fighter jet manufacturers to integrate this technology,” Miller said.

40,000 developers have expressed interest in building software that takes advantage of Leap’s gesture technology, and Leap Motion has already sent out 12,000 units to help developers build and test their code. Apps that are being built for Leap include games, productivity apps, music and art apps, and more, Miller said.

Leap Motion is also building an app store so that developers can monetize their Leap-compatible apps. The app store will be available for both Windows 8 and Mac OS X.

I asked Miller if Asus will be building any Leap-specific apps, as the computer manufacturer has already built a significant amount of software for its netbooks, laptops, and desktops in an attempt to differentiate itself from competitors. Miller confirmed that “it’s on the table,” and that the Leap is now “getting into their roadmap,” which would enable ASUS to build software that integrates gestures into a native, built-in way to interact with the company’s PCs.

Leap’s gesture-based technology seems a natural for gaming, and Miller said Leap Motion is also talking to gaming console manufacturers about incorporating better-quality gesture support into their platforms, but that “it’s not our priority right now.”

The Leap is now available for preorder at $69.99; the retail version, when available, will cost slightly more. ASUS has not yet set pricing for its Leap-equipped PCs, however.

The new $30 million funding round will help Leap Motion bring the technology to other OEMs and to retail channels later this year.

“Leap Motion is poised to fundamentally change human/computer interaction, and this new funding will help us bring our technology to the mass global market,” Leap Motion CEO Michael Buckwald said in a statement. “With this influx of capital, coupled with the major OEM partnership we also announced today, we’re ready to make 2013 the year of the new interface.”

Here’s a Leap in action:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Our team will be off to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas soon, and we’ll get plenty of glimpses of the future of technology there. We’ve all heard a lot of promises. But here are some things we’d love to see and use in real life in the near future — whether or not they’re at CES.

We’re not sure if we can get our wish, but this is the list of the coolest technologies that we can’t wait to use. I’ve relied on staff recommendations and other big thinkers for these tips. Thanks, all.

Tell us which one is your favorite in the poll, or suggest your own in the comments.

Google Glass

This technology is one of the truly inspired products coming down the road. It combines an eyeglass-style display with computing power and wireless technology that can deliver information to you based on what you look at in your surrounding environment. Project Glass promises to deliver information to you the instant you need it, like identifying the face of someone standing in front of you. Or so we hope.

Self-driving cars

Another innovation from Google is going through rigorous testing and the regulatory mill. These cars drive themselves based on computing, wireless, and camera technologies that can make a robot-driven car safer than a human-driven one. You can sit in the driver’s seat and do your email, but you can also override the controls if necessary. Once it’s polished, we’d love to take the car for a spin. But not before they get the bugs out.

Apple television

Okay, this mythical beast doesn’t really have to be made by Apple. But we need a TV that truly combines the best of the Internet and the best of traditional cable television. Apple has hinted something is coming that will transform the living room. We want to be able to play free or 99-cent apps on the high-definition screen and access our favorite TV shows and first-run movies. We have no clue, though, when this rumored Apple device will really arrive (if ever).

A 72-core Tegra 4-based tablet computer

Nvidia hasn’t announced anything yet, but the rumor is it will describe its next-generation Tegra chip at the Consumer Electronics Show next week. If that happens, you can expect that dozens of tablets and smartphones will follow. Tablets thrive on efficient battery use as well as performance. But Nvidia has been moving down the path of creating Tegra technology that offers both low-power consumption and outstanding 3D graphics and processing power at the same time. It’s time for another great leap that could put tablets on par with — or ahead of — the traditional PC.

Cool wireless technologies that don’t make us glow

The bottleneck in delivering fast Internet service to homes and mobile devices has strangled a lot of innovations. Bridging the last mile and delivering blazing-fast speeds to both home and mobile users is one of the great challenges facing us. It could be done with a huge investment in infrastructure, but smart technology might make it a reality as well. Steve Perlman (of Rearden and formerly the head of OnLive) has demoed Project DIDO, a distributed wireless Internet technology that gets around bottlenecks and delivers awesomeness in the not-so-distant future. We hope it’s real. And it would be great and necessary bonus if these technologies were really safe as well.

Cheap rides into space

I’m still waiting for the Southwest Airlines of space travel to arrive. Maybe $99 to the moon and back? After all, we want to be space tourists one day. The space shuttle has died, but maybe private companies will make it happen.

Better robots

It would be nice if we could count on the help of household robots and maybe get all of these great gadgets made by robots working in factories in the U.S. I’d like to try out a few personal robots, once they slim down in size and become a little more humanoid.

Indoor location

CSR’s Sirf Technologies division has figured out how to map indoor locations when you’re walking with your mobile phone inside a building. Now we have to see it in practice. Companies like WifiSLAM are hoping to make this real. We can’t wait until we can find our way through the giant hotel-casinos of Las Vegas without getting lost.

4K televisions that cost $500

I know that 4K TV, or those with four times as many pixels as today’s high-definition TVs, are going to be plentiful at CES. In the past year, these so-called Ultra HD TVs have debuted at prices at $25,000 or so. Can we skip the whole learning curve part and jump to the $500 model soon?

A.I./brains

I need a better brain. Or a brain enhancement. I’m counting on Jeff Hawkins’ Grok technology, which promises to deliver “big data” analysis based on the processing that resembles what happens in the human brain. Or something like it. It’s like those chips in William Gibson’s novel Johnny Mnemonic.

Personal gaming

Will Wright shared a vision last year for personal gaming, or a mobile game that was smart enough to know your interests, know your location, understand your context, and then deliver a surprising, fun gaming experience to you. The game collects a lot of big data about you and processes that. Then it creates a custom experience, a game made for just one person. You.

An awesome game console

How about a great video game console? One with free-to-play games with both traditional game controls and gesture recognition. I’d love to have a wide variety of indie games as well as blockbusters, and I’d like to extend my play to mobile game platforms and the web. Add backward-compatibility and cloud computing. Let’s hope that Sony and Microsoft are listening. Nintendo’s Wii U doesn’t quite do it for me.

Quantified self gadgets that automate calorie counting

We’ve got devices like Striiv that can count our steps. Other gadgets (like the Basis Health Tracker) can monitor our sleep, record our heart rate, and sync with the cloud. But we’d really like to get a device that photographs our meals (or does something like that) and calculates how many calories we’ll consume. This kind of technology could complete the loop in terms of figuring out our physical activity and our food intake, giving us the data we could use to calculate whether we are exercising enough and eating right. (VentureBeat’s John Koetsier supplied this idea, based on the “<a href=”“quantified self” movement where people try to measure everything about themselves).

If this list of new technologies doesn’t sound ambitious enough, we’re also waiting for some pie-in-the-sky science fiction to become reality. We’d like to go for a ride in the Star Trek Holodeck, a virtual reality simulation that is indistinguishable from reality, or live in the Metaverse virtual world of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. And I’d like to use that gesture-based computer that Tom Cruise used in Minority Report. But we’re assuming it’s going to take a while before the tech and entertainment industries can deliver on those visions.

Now if Moore’s Law ever stopped in its tracks, the engine behind all of this change would grind to a halt. Then we could say that things might truly get boring. On the other hand, nanotechnology might be quite useful in replacing semiconductor manufacturing with something else. So we’re not counting on getting bored anytime soon.

Image credits: Google, cmmorrison/Flickr, guilhermescha/Flickr, Nvidia, Lionsgate Television, SpaceX, Nao, Microsoft/Bing, LG, VLADGRIN/Shutterstock, Samsung, Samir Torres/VentureBeat

In the wake of the tragic events in Newtown, Conn., The Atlantic writer Marc Parrish called for a basic database to track and flag rapid weapon buildups and suspicious purchases.

“‘Big data’ might have stopped the massacres in Newtown, Aurora, and Oak Creek,” Parrish wrote, and he goes on to argue that tracking and analyzing ammunition and gun purchases would be “trivial” from a technology perspective, in comparison to vast efforts of large marketing departments to understand the buying patterns of current and potential customers.

VentureBeat invited entrepreneur Bruno Aziza and blogger Andrew Brust for a first-of-its-kind debate on whether Big Data is a solution to America’s big gun problem. Which side do you agree with?

Both our experts reference the film Minority Report as the potential of big data goes far further than a database. Parrish argues that “red flags,” or anomalies, would emerge from this pool of data, alerting the authorities to potential suspects. This variety of “precrime” detection is nothing new. As Bloomberg Businessweek reported, predictive analytics technologies are being used by law enforcement agencies to identify patterns of suspicious behavior among ex-cons in Salt Lake City.

So, is the next logical step to build big data tools and technologies to solve America’s gun problem? Or is this a fundamentally flawed premise, which would be rife with false positives? (In the comments section of The Atlantic piece, one gun owner notes that spree shooters use relatively small quantities of ammunition compared to the average enthusiast, and “regular violent criminals, even less.”)

And should technology be part of the conversation, or is it masking larger issues related to mental health and the proliferation of assault weapons?

Yes: But getting the data won’t be easy

Andrew Brust, big data blogger, and founder and CEO of Blue Badge Insights

Most monitoring of actions, status, and behavior has big data potential.  That means data around gun and ammunition purchases could be gathered and analyzed, too. It could be used to build predictive models and then forecast who might buy guns and who might use them.

Given historical data about known offenders’ purchases – both legal and illegal – data professionals could perform very useful analyses. For example, questions like “show me all registered gun owners who made five or more ammunition purchases in a 30-day period” become easy to answer. So too would queries to discover correlations and affinities, like “list the top five misdemeanor offenses committed by convicted gun violence perpetrators.” Perhaps more important, the same data could be used to build predictive models.  These models could then be used to analyze activities of nonoffenders and predict candidates for violent activity in the future.

This may sound like something out of the film Minority Report, but the technology is nonetheless quite real.  In fact, queries like those in the previous examples constitute garden-variety analytics work. And given the volumes of data around gun violence, we might not even need recent-vintage big data technology. Instead, the data mining and business intelligence technology that we’ve had for a decade or more would probably work very well.

But this isn’t just a question of technology — it’s a question of privacy, forensics, and interagency cooperation. What purchase data is relevant? And which of it is legal to amass and analyze for nonoffenders? Why would retailers share that data? How would we get agencies like the FBI and ATF to cooperate? Even if we could, how would we get the feds to work with state and local law enforcement?

Given ample data that is clean and consistent, building analytical databases and predictive models on it isn’t that hard. What is hard is getting through the politics necessary to gain access to the data and fostering the cooperation necessary to achieve the data’s cleanliness and consistency.

Corporate analytics projects face the same challenges: Most data in the enterprise is “silo-ed” and the teams who collect and curate it are similarly segregated — and sometimes adversarial. Now, move from the corporate setting to one involving a variety of private and public sector data sources, many of them subject to significant regulation, and you can understand why technology is the manageable part of the problem.

The technology of today can quite likely saves lives in the future, but only if the resulting ethical questions are examined and the hard work of human teamwork gets prioritized and gets done. In the end, this is less about big data and more about commitment, contemplation, careful planning, and political will.

No: It would deliver far too many false positives

Bruno Aziza, SiSense vice president of marketing

If you are a parent, you can’t help but reflect on the tragedy that hit Newtown Elementary school this December. And as a big data activist, I would love to believe that our ability to store, process, and analyze larger amounts of complex data could help us prevent such anomalies.

But I’m saddened to say that big data can’t solve this nation’s gun control issue or prevent events like the Newtown shooting.

While many have eluded to the potential benefits of a creating a national database of gun owners and better record-keeping for firearm and ammunition purchases, the issue with gun control has little to do with the data we have about the purchasers.

There is certainly room for better tracking: Most U.S. states still don’t require a license to purchase a gun. What if we created a unique ID that each buyer would be required to use when purchasing guns or ammunition? Equipped with such technology, we could reconcile purchases made online or at physical stores and detect patterns across various time periods and locations. This is a problem that we already know how to solve. Every retailer calls it “multichannel” intelligence.

But every retailer also knows that it is practically impossible to understand the usage patterns of a customer. In America, like in many other countries, guns are often purchased as gifts, descended from generation to generation. Buying patterns tell us little about usage. Short of putting sensors on gun owners and their gear, no technology can solve this issue.

What if we created at “killer’s attributes set” and ran its factors across the entire U.S. population? We could correlate attributes of a buyer, potential users, and their habits and aggregate all that data to “pre-identify” offenders, just like the hit film Minority Report. But this would not be a solution to a “big data” problem; it would be a “no data” problem because the data required to complete this set is currently not tracked anywhere.

Assuming that we could solve this issue though, I can’t help but think that such methods would be highly contested. On the simple issue of regulation, progun pundits deny the correlation between Great Britain’s stronger gun control laws its lower murder rates. It’d be hard to convince them of the validity of a highly correlated attribute set.

Moreover, as a society, we were to come to an agreement and open up free access to such personal information, who would be the guardian of the data? Who would guarantee that the models used for “precrime” wouldn’t be manipulated for some government’s benefits?

The debates I’ve read on gun control have been far from rational: They are punctuated by personal attacks, tales of conspiracy, and false debates around data justifying the need to own guns for protection. The fate of this issue rests in your government and its leadership. Big data can’t help here, I’m afraid.

Do you agree with our experts? Please weigh in with your thoughts in the comments section.

Gun on Constitution via Sascha Burkard // Shutterstock

The only thing needed now? Software that understands gestures.

Which is precisely why over the next two weeks, Leap Motion will send 10,000 Leap units to new developers to help them build software applications and games which take advantage of the new gesture-based input capabilities … and why the company has attracted over 40,000 developers so far.

San Francisco-based Leap Motion has already put the Leap device into limited mass production.

It’s about the size of a pack of gum, or small iPod. Sitting right in front of your Mac or PC, the device senses your hand motions and allows you to control your computer with hand gestures in the air. Those motions will allow you to zoom in on pictures, rotate on-screen 3-D objects, draw, write, create 3-D computer-aided designs, and much more.

The device costs about $70 at pre-order prices, and will be delivered to consumers in early 2013. But before the hardware is delivered, Leap Motion wants a rich software ecosystem.

So the company is also releasing an updated software development kit (SDK) today, with new features that will help developers build gesture-aware apps much faster than before. The new SDK offers pre-fabricated building blocks: a library of defined interaction APIs. Which means that instead of trying to comprehend how a user’s hand moved, developers will now have access to a library of sensed motions: a twist, a push, a sweep. The Leap software will report a defined and pre-identified motion, and developers will now simply need to map that gesture to actions in their applications.

“Our top priority is making sure that when the Leap Motion controller ships to consumers, it is supported by a wide array of quality apps,” Leap Motion co-founder and CEO Michael Buckwald said in a statement.

Leap Motion released a demo app showcasing how an intern software developer used the new SDK to create a simple 3-D game:

Finally, the company announced that Leap will ship with an app store, so users can pick up more software that understands what they are doing with their hands, and so developers can monetize their creations.

There is no word yet, however, on whether major applications such as Microsoft Office, iPhoto, or even web browsers such as Chrome will incorporate support for Leap gestures. Or whether operating system vendors such as Microsoft, Apple, and Google (yes, Chrome OS) will built support for Leap right into the system.

Leap Motion has raised $14.55 million from various investors to take the Leap and its gesture language to the world.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

In a scene from Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film Minority Report, a future cop on the run ducks into the Washington Metro to evade his pursuers. Within seconds, a passenger’s paper-thin digital newspaper, displaying USA Today, updates to show the fugitive’s face.

We’ve reached the stage where people are reading on instantly updatable digital devices, but our devices don’t resemble newspapers so much as, well, tablets. Now, a breakthrough in computer displays that are both flexible and potentially inexpensive is poised to make this moment of movie sci-fi gadgetry a reality with a tablet that is rollable, researchers say.

The key is improvements in electronic paper, or e-Paper, which is designed to mimic the look of ink on a sheet. E-Paper enjoys multiple advantages over the displays currently used in tablets. First, it does not emit light like a TV but instead shares paper’s reflective qualities, meaning that it does not require constant power to be read—leading to significant energy savings. Second, since less energy is required, the battery is lighter. Third, e-Paper has minimal glare so not only does it tire eyes less but it also can be read in sunlight.

But e-Paper can look somewhat dim, often reflecting only about 40 percent of all incoming white light because it fails to completely hide its ink. Furthermore, it often switches between images relatively sluggishly, too slow for anything but crude video.

Now, scientists have devised a new kind of e-Paper that demonstrates more than 90 percent reflectivity, exceeding the 76 percent of magazine-quality paper. In addition, the device can switch the images it displays every 15 milliseconds, compatible with video rates of speed. It combines the best elements of tablets and e-Paper.

“Other people have demonstrated rollable paper-thin displays before,” said researcher Jason Heikenfeld, a display scientist at the University of Cincinnati and director of the Ohio Center for Microfluidic Innovation. “But those were too dark to give color, and too slow to give video. We’re getting closer to giving both.”

Moreover, unlike most tablets, which are manufactured with rigid glass, this new e-Paper is made of plastic. This makes it flexible and thin enough to be rollable.

The findings were detailed online in the journal Nature Communications.

e-Paper without borders

In conventional e-Paper, the pixels comprising the images making up text, photos and video are each typically separated by borders that keep pixels from bleeding into one another. Although these borders are invisible to the eyes of consumers, they are basically dead, inactive space that dull any display.

This new e-Paper is a first in that its pixels have no borders. At its heart is a white porous film that ink can move through to show in front of or hide behind. Below it is a layer that holds all the ink. Sandwiching these are transparent plastic sheets that also hold the e-Paper’s electronics, which apply the electric fields on the ink that make it move back and forth.

The ink is allowed to pool underneath the white film, and when it is needed, it is electronically summoned up through pores in the film. This ink spreads out over the surface of the white film in droplets just large enough to fill the desired pixels. The design of the ink and the film allows these droplets to cling on the surface, just as raindrops can grip onto the surface of a car even when wind is blowing. Structures jutting out from the film help make sure the ink does not run together when the paper is squeezed.

“We spent about 12 to 18 months at the whiteboard just working through this theoretically before we had our ‘aha’ moment,” Heikenfeld said.

The new e-Paper’s lack of pixel borders also significantly simplifies the manufacturing process,  he added.

Higher resolution needed

So far the e-Paper has a resolution of 150 pixels per inch, which is useful enough for billboards and other signs. “Much higher resolution is fairly straightforward to fabricate, and will be developed,” Heikenfeld said.

Thus far, this new e-Paper is black and white. Researchers plan on developing a color version that works much like LCD screens do. The white sheet would have color filters put over it, effectively splitting each pixel into four sub-pixels that are side by side — red, green, blue and white. Color e-Paper cuts the brightness by about half, Heikenfeld said, but the breakthrough means the brightness would still be commercially acceptable.

“If this technology turns out to be robust and if it can be manufactured at a low cost, there is a high probability of commercialization,” said display scientist Jurgen Daniel at technology consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, who did not participate in this work.

The scientists are currently working with Cincinnati-based startup company Gamma Dynamics to develop their e-Paper. Their plan is to make signs with the e-Paper in two years and e-readers in three years, Heikenfeld said.

Charles Q. Choi has written for Scientific American, The New York Times, Wired, Science and Nature, among others. In his spare time, he has traveled to all seven continents, including scaling the side of an iceberg in Antarctica, investigating mummies from Siberia, snorkeling in the Galapagos, climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, camping in the Outback, avoiding thieves near Shaolin Temple and hunting for mammoth DNA in Yukon.

Originally published on Dell’s Tech Page One.

But the Famo.us user interface, based on an extended conversation I had with founder Steve Newcomb, is really cool. It’s a lot like the touch interface that Tom Cruise used in the film Minority Report. The neat thing is that this 3D interface is completely browser-based and it requires no plug-ins or clunky HTML5 coding. Newcomb says his small team found a clever way to engineer 3D capability into a web browser without all of the usual problems.

That clever coding — a rendering engine by a company with just three employees including co-founder Mark Lu — could result in web pages that surprise and delight you or games that you just start playing as soon as you visit a web site. Developers who sign up with Famo.us will eventually get access to the technology and be able to create interesting applications on top of it.

“We looked at HTML5 for 18 months and found problems in the web browser that won’t make it perform,” Newcomb said. “So we could have waited for the browser companies to fix the code, or just do something ourselves.”

In a newsletter, Newcomb said, “In short, after many years of development, we finally solved the performance issues that have plagued complex web apps.  App layouts, animations and designs that were only possible in native apps are now within the reach of all web developers.  We hope our accomplishment unleashes a wave of web app development like we’ve never seen before.”

He added, “Famo.us enables web developers to build apps across multiple devices and provides developers with a view layer, app layouts, scaffolding, UI and UX components, themes, fonts and JavaScript plugins.”

Big companies like Facebook and Wooga have tried to stretch HTML5 to be able to do more, but they gave up and had no hope that it would enable things like 3D user interfaces. The frame rates for HTML5 pages are just too unpredictable. Newcomb concluded the same thing.

“Everybody has banged their heads against the wall,” he said. “We came to the conclusion that normal web methods would not work. So we looked at the problem from other vectors.”

Newcomb isn’t describing the technology much this yet, but he has released a cool demo (see video at bottom) that hints at the possibilities. And he has created a replica of a Twitter iPad app that runs better than the original.

The fact that Famo.us, a tiny startup, has come up with this technology is interesting. But Newcomb has a noteworthy background. He co-founder Powerset, the search company that Microsoft acquired in 2008 for more than $100 million. Powerset became Microsoft’s Bing search engine, but Newcomb left to consider his next big thing.

“We asked ourselves, ‘What if we approached this the way a gaming engineer would?’” Newcomb said. “We would talk directly to the” graphics processing unit (GPU, or graphics chip). He added, “We saw Javascript could do a raw game rendering engine, but we found a way to render an app and pass that render to the GPU, skipping all the things that we were waiting on the browser companies to fix. We found a way to bypass it by having a direct mathematical conversation with the GPU.”

If that doesn’t make sense to you, that’s OK. It’s just a hint that Famo.us came up with a clever solution. The solution is not a plug-in, not a Web GL technology, not Adobe Flash. There is nothing to download. As an example, they found that math equations known as transforms were one reason browsers loaded slowly. So his team wrote their own transforms which could load much faster. His software works at 60 frames per second.

“We solved a web application developer’s problem,” he said. “We have a novel approach of making web apps themselves” perform well.

Rivals include companies Game Closure, Ludei, Spaceport i/o, and others. But Newcomb believes he can do better than the solutions those companies offer (mainly for fast-action games). Those solutions are also aimed at 2D games, not 3D.

One test is that web pages written via Famo.us and its Javascript code can load an infinite amount of data, so you can scroll down forever. It works fine on web pages and on mobile. With a 3D user interface, you can spin the interface and stop it on any given object and then drill down on that object.

“Apps are just going to look beautiful,” sort of like Flipboard, Newcomb said.

To get the technology into the market, Famo.us will create its own applications first. (It’s not going to do a Minority Report user interface). Then it will polish a software developer kit and share it with third-party developers. Famo.us apps will run on Android, iOS, PC, Macs, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo devices. Newcomb says it isn’t clear yet just how easy it will be for developers to program the Famo.us way, but he is sure it will be worth it.

Famo.us has raised $1.1 million from Greylock Partners, Naval Ravikant, Javelin Ventures, and Interwest Venture Partners.

Newcomb is speaking at the HTML5 developers conference on Oct. 15 and 16. Here’s a video demo below:

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