RealSense D400-Series Depth Cameras Are For Devs, Not Consumers (Hands On)

[kcarbotte]

Intel launched a new generation of RealSense depth cameras this week, and they feature stereo cameras, updated depth modules, and Intel RealSense D4 vision processors. But these cameras aren’t built for consumers; these are for developers.

RealSense D400-Series Depth Cameras Are For Devs, Not Consumers (Hands On) : Read more

 

[bit_user]

Thanks for the review. My only disappointment is that range is limited to 10 M. It's good enough for most purposes, but I wouldn't mind even coarse depth information (via stereo) at greater distances.

 

[d0x360]

Funny how far ahead Microsoft was with the Kinect, especially version 2 on the Xbox one. It had everything this does plus a microphone system that could locate someone by their voice and filter out tons of loud noise to hear them and accept commands from them. It was also quite nice for Skype calls because it would follow you around the room no matter where you went and recorded you in 1080p.

Sure high end devices can do what the Kinect did better because they aren't under cost constraints but when you consider how powerful the $100 Kinect v2 was it's impressive. Its sensors we're high enough resolution that it could do skeletal tracking on your fingers.

I only bring it up because really we are just starting to see devices from other companies hit the same level of quality. The only thing that detracted from the Kinect was the fact that so little processing resources could be devoted to it's use. If they had included a built in ARM CPU it would have been quite the device...still a horrible idea for games unless of course it was being used for VR tracking. It would have been fantastic for that especially if they had a VR edition that did have an arm cpu.

I wonder how many patents Intel has to license from Microsoft to build these cameras

 

[bit_user]

If they had included a built in ARM CPU it would have been quite the device...

It's far more efficient to use a portion of the console's GPU resources for this. Those sorts of algorithms tend to be very GPU-friendly. ARM CPUs have compute power in the single to low double-digits of GFLOPS - the XBox One's GPU is 2-3 orders of magnitude faster, depending which we're talking about. Plus, if you want a respectable amount of processing power, you need reasonably fast memory - all of which adds yet more cost to the device.

MS approach to their HMD design follows the same philosophy as Kinect - make the accessory cheap (i.e. no external cameras) and make up for it with more processing in the GPU. Even so, their GPU requirements for VR are the most modest of any PC VR solution.

unless of course it was being used for VR tracking. It would have been fantastic for that

According to the father of Hololens, the Kinect came from the same overall roadmap that featured Hololens. That means they're very much considered in the same universe. MS could do a lot with it, but it largely depends on the world embracing their vision of mixed reality computing.

I wonder how many patents Intel has to license from Microsoft to build these cameras

FWIW, MS didn't build the original kinect from the ground-up. They integrated some 3rd-party sensors already on the market.

Anyway, I suspect Intel's camera is mostly aimed at robotics applications. People have used Kinect for that, as well.

 

[peter.boos]

So disapointing kinnect still far ahead width true TTF camera, this dot pattern is old technology as was used in kinect 360 and currently also in iphones, most pixels are interpolated (as only the dots depths are known by pattern offset, which is prown to errors and high noise ratio's (only 1/8 or even less is a measured pixel). I'd really hoped they would be the successor to the Kinect One, as Microsoft had indicated when they stopped producing them, as a robotics developer i' need precision lots of TTF pixels, not a device that puts us back to kid toys of the year 2005

 

[bit_user]

So disapointing kinnect still far ahead width true TTF camera

What's TTF? Do you mean ToF (Time of Flight)?