Microsoft acquires Canesta, developer of 3-D sensor technology

Microsoft is acquiring Canesta, a company that makes 3-D sensor technology for chips.

The Sunnyvale, Calif., company announced the merger Friday in a news release.

Canesta has 70 employees and has raised about $70 million. It has developed technology for chips to form electronic images in 3-D.

The technology would fit into Microsoft's push toward a natural user interface, sometimes called NUI, which the company has been calling the next evolutionary step beyond the graphical user interface, or GUI.

"Microsoft has long pursued a vision of natural user interface — Canesta has developed some interesting technology for sensing gestures that complements the advances already under way at Microsoft," Microsoft spokesman Lou Gellos said in a statement. "Microsoft has a long history of investing in this technology, and this acquisition is just part of that long-term strategy; it is not for any specific product in the future."

Kinect, for instance, is a new motion sensor for the Xbox 360 video-game system that allows users to play by moving around in front of the Kinect camera. Microsoft will start selling Kinect on Thursday.

Microsoft has also shown demos about the hypothetical office of the future, where workers use gestures to interact with a computer rather than through a mouse or keyboard.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed in the announcement.

Sharon Pian Chan: 206-464-2958 or schan@seattletimes.com