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CANESTA, INC.
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Canesta is the inventor of a revolutionary, low-cost electronic perception technology that enables ordinary electronic devices to perceive and react to nearby objects or individuals in real time.
Machines have been blind from birth. Abilities humans take for granted are denied machines because they cannot see the world around them to react or interact with it. But given such capability, entire new categories of devices are possible that were previously unthinkable, offering new levels of functionality, and convenience to consumers, businesses, industry, and government.
Canesta has developed and in several cases patented new, low-cost, semiconductor-based methods for forming electronic images of nearby objects in three dimensions. Unlike the sensors in digital still and video cameras that see the world as flat images, Canesta technology can additionally compute the distance from the sensor of every single pixel in the image, in real time.
What is remarkable about this breakthrough is that the technology can be implemented in a single, low-cost CMOS chip that – along with the appropriate proprietary Canesta software – can bring electronic perception technology to a wide range of consumer and industrial electronic products ranging from cell phones to PDAs to games to industrial, medical, and security equipment.
Canesta has announced the Integrated Canesta Keyboard™, a projection keyboard capable of being fully integrated into smartphones, cell phones, PDAs, or other mobile or wireless devices. When equipped with the Integrated Canesta Keyboard, the OEM device uses a tiny laser to project the image of a full-sized keyboard onto a convenient flat surface between the device and the user, such as a tabletop or briefcase, and the user "types" on this image. Canesta's electronic perception technology is then used to resolve the user's finger movements in real time into ordinary serial keystroke data that is easily utilized by the wireless or mobile device.
The Integrated Canesta Keyboard is made possible by a revolutionary chipset embodying electronic perception technology. The Canesta Keyboard Perception Chipset™, which contains a tiny 3-D sensor module, the equally tiny keyboard pattern projector, and a small infrared light source, are designed to be integrated by OEMs into their products with very little cost, power, size or weight impact.
Canesta also offers an OEM development toolkit that aids OEMs in prototyping projection keyboard designs and layouts. The Canesta Keyboard Perception Chipset may be ordered with a standard QWERTY keyboard, or any custom Roman or non-roman keyboard that the OEM has designed with the development kit.
The "missing link" with mobile and wireless devices is the ability to do highly productive data input. Although in common use, input solutions such as thumb keyboards or handwriting recognition are profoundly limited in their ability to support intensive data-input applications. An integrated projection keyboard means that the mobile or wireless device can now support applications that would ordinarily only be practical with a full-sized, mechanical keyboard. This is good news for OEMs that wish to differentiate their products with important, new mobility applications, and good news for service providers, that now can offer value added services to their subscribers, including "leave your notebook PC at home."
Canesta's electronic perception technology incorporates several different methodologies for forming 3-D, real time moving images. Certain of the methodologies, such as a semiconductor chip that uses light photons to "range" the image, similar to radar, have been patented. Others are being protected as trade secrets.
What is common between the technologies is that all develop 3-D depth maps at a rate in excess of 30 frames per second, and then perform additional processing on these depth maps to resolve the images into application-specific information that can easily be processed by the embedded processor(s) in an OEM device. For example, the Canesta Keyboard Perception Chipset detects finger motions typing on a projected keyboard, and further processes the 3-D information into serial keystroke data, making the output of the sensor chip appear just like a classical serial keyboard.
Generically, all varieties of Canesta's technology have a chip/sensor hardware component, and sophisticated Canesta image processing software embedded in the chips.
Since Canesta's software starts with a three-dimensional view of the world, provided immediately by the hardware, it has a substantial advantage over classical image processing software that struggles to construct three-dimensional representations using complex mathematics, and images from multiple cameras or points of view. This dramatic reduction in complexity makes it possible to embed the processing software directly into the chips themselves so they may be used in the most modestly-priced electronic devices.
Canesta's technologies will be made available to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in the form of chips and developer's toolkits. The recently-announced Integrated Canesta Keyboard, based upon the Canesta Keyboard Perception Chipset, is exemplary, as is the companion OEM development kit.
The applications are limited only by one's imagination. If you "sight-enable" an electronic device or machine, it suddenly can react to and interact with the world in an entirely new way. For example, an automobile could sense other vehicles nearby and provide an alert tone if a maneuver – such as a lane change – would create a conflict. Or a baby monitor could detect if a child left its crib, or if a third party entered the room. And video or virtual reality games could be freed from any mechanical input whatsoever. The game sees the player, and reacts to his actions.
When such capability can, for the first time, be physically added to virtually any product in a cost-efficient manner, designers will let their imaginations run free.
Canesta has a number of significant OEM contracts with major, multinational electronics firms for the incorporation of electronic perception technology in consumer and industrial products.
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