In June 2008, on a flight home from Europe to San Francisco, I was given a fascinating demo of some jaw-dropping technology.

I was sitting next Inon Beracha, CEO of Israeli company PrimeSense, which had developed a low-cost chip and software to do 3D machine vision.

The system used a pair of cameras and an infrared sensor to highlight people and track their movements.

On his laptop, Beracha showed me videos of people waving their hands in the air to control Wii-like games. He showed people controlling TV programming menus by gesturing their hands in the air. And, most impressive of all, someone flipping through a photo slide show like they were Tom Cruise in Minority Report. It was so slick, I asked him if it was CGI. It was real, he said, and so cheap, the technology could eventually be found everywhere in the home, office and car.

Of course, PrimeSense’s system is at the heart of Microsoft’s new Kinect game controller, which is getting rave reviews and looks set to be a monster hit. It’s a “crazy, magical, omigosh rush,” says the New York Times‘ David Pogue.

And it almost belonged to Apple.

This is a guest interview by Mike Bastoli of The Pixar Blog, a popular news blog about the studio.

Lee Unkrich is the director of Disney-Pixar’s Toy Story 3, the highest-grossing animated film of all time, which was released on DVD, Blu-ray and iTunes today. He also served as co-director of Toy Story 2 and editor of Toy Story, and is a member of Pixar’s Senior Creative Team.

Unkrich is an avid Mac user and Apple ‘addict’ who can be spotted at Apple’s events from time to time. “Whenever I’m invited, it’s something awwwwwwesome,” he tweeted to his 80,000 plus followers on Twitter ahead of the launch of the iPad in January.

Here’s an exclusive interview with Unkrich, who talks about his first Mac, Apple cameos in Pixar’s movies and Steve Jobs feeding his Apple addiction.

Apple’s massive new data center is a 21st-century broadcasting system to rival the TV networks of old, says a leading expert in cloud computing.

Nick Carr, author of the “The Big Switch” a bestseller about the cloud, says Apple’s North Carolina facility is a “broadcasting system” not unlike NBC or CBS, but one that distributes software as well as media.

“Apple increasingly views its mainstream computers, from iPod Touch to iPhone to iPad to MacBook Air, as media players, with “media” spanning not just audio and video but also apps,” Carr wrote in an email. “From that perspective, the North Carolina data center can be seen as essentially a broadcasting system that will enable Apple to make the shift from a downloading model of media distribution to a streaming model. It’s a proprietary broadcasting system (not altogether unlike traditional broadcasting systems), which means it’s a very different model of the cloud from the open model promoted by Google.”

At 500,000 square feet, Apple’s $1 billion data center will be among the largest in the world. The unusual size of the data center suggests that Apple has ambitious plans for cloud computing.

The massive facility is coming online before the end of the year, Apple has said, although what it will be used for, the company hasn’t detailed.

It’s assumed it will be used to stream music and movies from iTunes. Reports suggest the company is going to build a big office complex next door and is “going after the cable market.”

But it goes deeper than that, says Carr. The facility will help transition Apple from a download model of computing to a streaming model of computing.

Here’s what else he had to say about Apple’s unique take on the cloud:

I want to like MobileMe.  It’s the Apple-sanctioned slice of cloud computing, integrated with the Mac and iOS operating systems.  The setup is simple, the price is reasonable, and despite the unprofessional name and lack of phone support, when all is humming along things just work.

Except MobileMe doesn’t keep working.  It stops syncing.  It loses data.  And Apple provides little or no advance warning of potential problems, nor easy ways to fix issues that occur.  Apple TV may have moved on to a professional product stage with the latest iteration, but from a business perspective MobileMe is still a “hobby” for Apple.

Apple’s just seen fit to tighten up the Terms and Conditions applying to iTunes rentals… and in doing so have finally closed a loophole that allowed rented television shows to be transferred between the iPad and other iOS devices.

Publicly-traded companies are obliged to file annual reports with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commision. Most are dry, recitations of a firm’s plans and projections, but sometimes they give insight into an otherwise tight-lipped organization, such as Apple. The Cupertino, Calif. company, riding high from its recent iPhone 4 and iPad successes, has increased its staff by a third, hiked its advertising budget and isn’t expecting any big acquisitions in 2011.

Apple has 26,500 employees, a third more than the 10,000 reported in 2009. The increase may be linked to the company’s retail expansion. The iPad maker has 317 retail stores, up from 273 a year ago. The company told federal regulators it plans to open 50 more retail locations in 2011.

More evidence has been uncovered that Apple intends to double the size of its soon-to-be-operational 500,000 square-foot data center in North Carolina. Apple, in 2009, purchased 70 acres just across the street from the already-disclosed location of its Maiden, NC site, according to new reports. The news appears to support rumors that the Cupertino, Calif. company will eventually create a 1-million acre site to support future streaming media ventures.

Initially, when in 2009 Apple acquired land for a second data center in addition to its Newark, Calif. locations, reports put the land purchase at 183 acres. However, this new report supports talk of a “Phase 2” which would create a second mirror-image of the previously-disclosed data center.

Couch potatoes take note: Peel, a free app that’s a sort of mix between Netflix’s movie suggestions and TV Guide, made its debut last week.

And it’s got a star-studded development team backing it up. Core members of the original iTunes team helped create Peel’s interface, and a team that beat Netfilx’s movie-suggestion algorithm in a competition worked on Peels innards.

Apple’s new data center in North Carolina is “fully operational” and prepared to “ramp up production,” according to a weekend report. Additionally, the industry publication appears to confirm last week’s report that the Cupertino, Calif. company may double the current 500,000 square-foot server farm.

The report buttresses a July statement by Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer to reporters. “We expect to complete it by the end of the calendar year, and begin to use it,” the executive said. Since acknowledging the North Carolina site’s existence nearly a year ago, the location has been the source of rumor and speculation.

That one programmer slaving away on Apple’s iOS Remote app has been working overtime, lately: he’s just issued an update to the app, fixing a number of bugs that showed up after the last major revision.