Short · 2026-09-29
A University of Tokyo gesture camera, and the company Nikon kept.
A high-speed-vision spin-off that crowdfunded a gesture-tracking camera called ZKOO in 2015; Nikon's fund bought all its shares in 2018 and Nikon made it a wholly owned subsidiary in 2021.
Exvision's listing was really about one product. ZKOO, it said, was "the first gesture tracking camera based on Hi-Speed Vision," reading images at a much higher frame rate than ordinary video and reproducing multi-touch input. Because it worked like a touchscreen, the company claimed, you could "gesture-play hundreds of existing games and apps" on a PC, tablet, set-top box, games console or smart TV without anyone rewriting them.
On 9 December 2015, the University of Tokyo spin-off took ZKOO to Kickstarter with a $15,000 goal, a $60 backer price and a planned retail price of $120.
The camera is the part of the story we could not finish. The company is not. Nikon's page for Exvision gives its history in a few lines: founded on 30 January 2009; all its shares acquired by the Nikon SBI Innovation Fund in October 2018; 100 percent owned by Nikon, as a subsidiary, from August 2021. Its business is described as high-speed vision platforms and solutions, and Nikon's group site carried Exvision news items into 2025.
Whether ZKOO itself ever shipped widely is not something we could establish. The old exvision.co.jp domain now belongs to an unrelated cybersecurity firm.