A small number of Microsoft employees, including the head of its Surface Hub team and some people from its HoloLens division, have left the company to form a new San Francisco-based start-up called perceptiveIO.
The new company was formed quietly in May (via WalkingCat on Twitter) and was co-founded by Jeff Han, who also created Perceptive Pixel, which made massive touchscreen PCs. Microsoft acquired Perceptive Pixel in 2012 and Han stayed on to lead the development of the successor to his big touchscreen PCs, the Surface Hub, which began shipping to customers earlier in 2016. It's unknown how Han's departure from Microsoft will affect the Surface Hub division.
The other co-founder of perceptiveIO is Shahram Izadi, who worked on the HoloLens team. Izadi gained some fame earlier this year when he was the subject of a video demoing "Holoportation", a way to use the HoloLens to view a full 3D holographic video of a person for both real-time and recorded chats.
The LinkedIn page for perceptiveIO shows eight former Microsoft team members that are now part of this startup. Exactly what these folks are working on is a mystery, but its website says that it is hiring people to help "build user experiences that radically shift the way people can interact with computers". It adds:
We are looking for talented scientists, engineers, and designers at all levels of seniority to work on bleeding-edge research and products at the intersection of real-time computer vision, applied machine learning, novel displays, sensing, and human-computer interaction. Working at perceptiveIO you will take theory to practice designing, implementing, evaluating, and shipping cutting-edge perceptive systems.
