The software giant is buying Perceptive Pixel, which manufactures wall-mounted and workstation-size multi-touch displays and a stylus for marking up on-screen images.
Microsoft said it is acquiring Perceptive
Pixel, a six-year-old company involved in the research, development and
production of large-scale, multi-touch display solutions.
Perceptive Pixel, also referred to as PPI, is
the technology behind those large wall-sized displays that anchors on CNN use
to show maps of the United States and identify which states are turning blue or
red during election night coverage. The company makes 27-inch, 55-inch
and 82-inch LCD multi-touch displays that can be wall-mounted or operate as a
desktop workstation. The Active Stylus product is a pen-like device that a
person can use to write on a screen image as though they were putting an ink
pen to paper.
The acquisition of PPI allows us to draw on
our complementary strengths, and were excited to accelerate this market
evolution, Kurt DelBene, president of Microsofts Office Division, said in a
statement. PPIs large touch displays, when combined with hardware from our
OEMs, will become powerful Windows 8-based PCs and open new possibilities for
productivity and collaboration.
The
Windows
8 operating system, expected to be widely available by late October, will
deliver multi-touch capabilities to endpoint devices. At its Worldwide Partner
Conference July 9 in Toronto, Microsoft announced that Windows 8 would be
released to manufacturers in early August.
Perceptive Pixel was founded in 2006 by Jeff
Han, described as a pioneer in multi-touch technology. The company shipped its
first workstation and wall-mounted displays in 2007 and was a feature of CNNs
coverage of the presidential race in 2008 and various other state races. The
Smithsonian awarded the company the National Design Award in 2009 in its
first-ever category of Interaction Design.
The displays will be interoperable with
Microsoft Office applications, particularly those that enable collaboration
such as Lync and SharePoint, said Han.
On the software side, Perceptive Pixel offers
an application called Storyboard to help plan presentations like a director
uses a storyboard to plan the shooting of a movie or other production,
PetroTouch for specific use of multi-touch in the field of geoscience, an
Election app to create maps for TV news coverage of elections and a Perspective
Pixel API for incorporating multi-touch into other apps.
Terms of the acquisition by Microsoft were
not disclosed.
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