According to reports from popular technology blog, “Motorola Mobility today announced that it has acquired Viewdle, a leading imaging & gesture recognition company,” a Motorola spokesperson informed CNET today. “Motorola and Viewdle have an existing commercial agreement and have been cooperating for some time. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.”
Interestingly, as the techno world is advancing and simultaneously facing threats from various quarters, gesture and facial recognition appears to be the next technology that smartphones and other device manufacturers will be using as they seek to differentiate themselves as rivals have also been moving down this path.
In fact, Viewdle is a cross platform developer that creates applications and software development kits that enable facial and gesture recognition that are optimized for the low power environment of mobile devices. At last year’s CTIA conference the company won the Social Networking / Content / Entertainment category of CTIA’s annual Emerging Technology (E-Tech) Awards competition.
Viewdle technology provides the ability to automatically tag photos… (Credit: Viewdle)
According to the description on the Viewdle site that reads: “Viewdle sits between the camera and the consumer-introducing new user experiences in mobile interaction, augmented reality, photo management, gaming, social networking, and marketing. We enable people to see the world through computer vision with face, object, and gesture recognition technology products that realize the full potential of the many advanced consumer devices that are now on the market-smartphones, tablets, and other camera-enabled devices.” Viewdle’s technology also applies to automatic photo tagging, a feature that Google would make good use of in Google+, Picasa, and other similar services.
The Ukrainian-based Viewdle was founded in 2007 and now has its headquarters in Silicon Valley, closed an estimated $2 million Series A round of funding backed by Anthem Venture Partners. It closed its Series B round of funding in October 2010 after raising $10 million. Among the company’s investors are Best Buy Capital, BlackBerry Partners Fund, Qualcomm, KCP Capital and Anthem Venture Partners.
Nevertheless, industry experts anticipate the Google-owned mobile manufacturer to bring some new augmented reality or image recognition features to some of its upcoming devices, and are excited to see what they may be. Google has previously developed AR apps like Google Goggles, and demoed upcoming heads up display glasses, in its ongoing Project Glass endeavor.