Grizzly Analytics Blog

Grizzly Analytics was happy to be invited to the product launch of DecaWave's new chip for indoor location positioning  in early November. Their chip uses UWB radio to precisely measure the distance between two chips. If their chips are put inside "beacon" devices in a room, and also inside "tags" on objects that move around the room, a system can track the locations of the objects moving around the room very precisely, to within 12-15cm. We were unable to video a complete large-scale demo, because of the big crowd in the room, but we did get the following video that shows how precisely the system is able to track objects as they move around. The demo was done with four beacons in the corners of the room that are used to triangulate the locations of chips moving around the room. The demo as shown does not do any smoothing or post-processing of that triangulation. DecaWave's chip is the latest in more than 50 solutions coming to market for indoor locat

After a long time of rumors and leaks , it's confirmed that Apple is acquiring gesture recognition company PrimeSense. For those who don't know, it was PrimeSense's technology that powered Microsoft's original XBox (then Kinect) gesture-based gaming console. We predicted Apple's acquiring a gesture recognition company months ago, but expected that it would be one of the smaller companies. This acquisition is the latest is a series of acquisitions in the gesture recognition area.   Google acquired Flutter ,  Intel acquired Omek Interactive  and  Qualcomm acquired GestureTek .  In addition, Samsung has released gesture recognition of some of their latest phones and TVs , and many other companies are researching the area. We're most excited by software approaches to gesture recognition, especially micro-gestures. But Apple's acquisition of PrimeSense shows their choice of a hardware solution. The $256,000 question, of course, is what Apple is plan

Apple ( AAPL ) has a fascinating way of coming into a new area, developing a device or feature that has been done before but never achieved mass-market adoption, and being the first to bring this new device or feature to the masses. Sometimes they manage this because they implement the device or feature better than others, sometimes it's because they introduce their own new twist, and sometimes it's just because they're Apple. But the power of Apple to legitimize an already existing area when they enter it is seen time and time again. A few months ago Apple launched a new concept that they called iBeacons. iBeacons are Apple's biggest foray to date into the growing area of indoor location services, and are aimed directly at one of the lucrative segments of this area, namely retail in-store mobile applications. What Apple is poised to do is legitimize, so to speak, the use of new hardware beacons in indoor locations for the purpose of location-based applications....