OpenNI

» see openni.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In November 2010 the Kinect had been on sale for a few weeks and people were already taking it apart. PrimeSense, the Israeli company whose depth-sensing chip was inside it, set up OpenNI as a non-profit with Willow Garage and ASUS, and opened the website on 8 December. The stated purpose was certifying interoperability between natural interaction devices. The actual purpose was making sure the sensor had a life outside the Xbox.

OpenNI was the middle layer. Underneath sat the drivers for whatever camera you had plugged in, and on top sat NITE, PrimeSense's closed-source package that turned a depth image into a skeleton with joints you could address by name. In between, OpenNI gave you one API that behaved the same on Linux as it did on Windows, which no part of Microsoft's stack did at the time. Microsoft's own Kinect SDK did not ship until February 2012, and when it did it was Windows-only with licensing terms that made academic use awkward for the first year.

So for about eighteen months OpenNI was how you did this work. If you read a robotics paper from 2011 or 2012 that mentions real-time pose estimation on consumer hardware, it was almost certainly built on OpenNI, and the ROS packages that wrapped it came out of Willow Garage, which was the other serious name on the founding list.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what $150 bought ~

The thing worth being precise about is the price. Before late 2010 a depth camera was a lab instrument. Time-of-flight units ran into five figures and structured-light rigs got built by hand, which meant the number of people who could put three-dimensional perception on a desk was bounded by how many institutions carried that budget line. The Kinect was $150 at a games retailer, and OpenNI was the thing that let you point it at something other than a living room.

The price is also where I should declare an interest. Depth perception on cheap hardware is the category I work in, and it was pried open by exactly that collapse in sensor cost: 3D stopped being a procurement question and turned into a weekend one. I was not writing against OpenNI in 2011, but the papers I read coming into this field were, and the habit of treating a human as a tree of joints with a confidence value hung on each one reaches us through NITE more than through anything academic.

~ the acquisition ~

On 24 November 2013 Apple bought PrimeSense for a reported $360 million. The chip was the point of the purchase, and it eventually came back as the Face ID sensor in the iPhone X. The consortium was not the point of anything, and Apple has never run an open standards body.

Word went out in March 2014 that openni.org would close on 23 April, downloads included. There was a petition, called Apple: Don't Kill OpenNI, written in the tone of petitions that are really obituaries. Nothing came of it. On the day, the site went and the binaries went with it. The binaries mattered more than the site, because a framework whose installers have evaporated cannot be used to reproduce the papers written against it.

Occipital, which had shipped the Structure Sensor using PrimeSense parts, forked OpenNI 2 and has kept it on GitHub ever since as part of its own SDK. Mirrors of the old OpenNI and NITE installers went up in half a dozen places and some of them are still there. The domain itself was kept and pointed somewhere: openni.org today returns the front page of apple.com, with a title tag that just reads Apple.

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