Imagination may not be a company you’re familiar with, but they make the PowerVR SGX 535 graphics processing unit that’s inside Apple’s A4 chip, which is at the heart the Apple iPad, iPhone 4, iPod touch and the new Apple TV. In 2008 Apple thought Imagination was so critical to their future that they bought a 3% share in the company, then raised that share to 9.5% in June 2009, so that’s why news of Imagination acquiring a company is important. The company in question is called “Caustic Graphics” and the deal is reported to have gone through for a cool $27 million. Caustic Graphics specializes in something called ray tracing, which is a technique for rendering 3D graphics that yields more natural lighting, “cinema quality 3D”, and photorealistic graphics. Almost none of the games that are out on the market use ray tracing because it’s so taxing on graphics processors. That’s due to change in the short to medium term, and with ray tracing inside mobile phones we’re going to see a totally new level of fluid user experiences and interaction models.
“Our vision is to enable cinema quality computer graphics at new cost and power consumption design points,” said Caustic Chief Executive Chip Stearns. “We are excited at the prospect of becoming part of the Imagination team as we bring ray tracing to a much broader base, and utilize their extensive resources and partnerships to bring our technology to every consumer screen.”
With iOS starting to look a bit stale, we’re eager to see what Apple has up their sleeve to make their user interface fresh again. They recently patented radial menus, but we’re thinking something more is required. Then with Android 3.0 we’re going to see Google’s attempt at making their OS easier to use, and let’s not forget Nokia’s strong statement that they’ll create a user interface unlike anything that’s ever been seen before.
[Image via Caustic Graphics Artist Gallery]