Apple is the new owner of Faceshift, the motion capture technology that Disney subsidiary Lucasfilm used to help bring alien characters to life in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Although the acquisition went through in August this year and was rumoured at the time, Apple has only now confirmed the news. In a statement to TechCrunch,,
the company said that "Apple buys smaller technology companies from
time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans".
Faceshift,
based on technologies originally developed at the École Polytechnique
Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, works by analysing data captured by
a depth camera similar to Microsoft's Kinect. The system uses an
infrared dot grid to detect objects and motion in three dimensions, and
movement data from the camera, including head position, gaze direction
and the location of arbitrary marker points on the face, is then applied
to a 3D model either in real time or, for greater accuracy, in
post-processing.
According to Faceshift's Unity page, "this package has been deprecated from the Asset Store. This means that new purchases of the package are not allowed and that only users who already purchased or downloaded the package before it was deprecated, are allowed to download it". While this will doubtless disappoint potential customers who'd like to get their hands on the animation technology, it's par for the course when Apple acquires a company.
