Intel Adds More Data, Capabilities To Its Real Sense Depth-Sensing Cameras

November 14, 2018 by Dave Haynes

Stressing that I have only a fleeting command of the technical details of this, it is nonetheless interesting and useful to point out to solutions providers and experiential designers that Intel’s camera for tracking things like gestures just got better.

The Intel RealSense Depth Camera D435i has “a new inertial measurement unit that enables developers to create solutions with more advanced depth-sensing and tracking capabilities for applications including drones, robotics and gaming.”

Only for nerds (avert your eyes otherwise):

The Intel RealSense D435i is the next evolution of the Intel RealSense D435 camera, adding 6 degrees of freedom data from an internal IMU that combines a variety of linear accelerometers with gyroscopes to detect both rotation and translation for three axes, as well as pitch, yaw and roll. For advanced scanning, the IMU provides an extra set of data allowing for dense reconstruction, and provides more reference so the camera doesn’t lose tracking. For example, in robotics, the robotics operating system provides not only vision but position data.

The Intel RealSense D435i runs on the open source Intel RealSense SDK 2.0, which now includes support for the IMU and enables fast, easy development across several programming languages so developers can quickly create prototypes to interact with real or virtual environments.

Why It’s Important:

The Intel RealSense D435i provides an extra set of data for developers to create applications with more advanced depth-sensing and tracking in the same 90 mm x 25 mm x 25 mm form factor as the original Intel RealSense D435 Depth Camera. The built-in IMU provides an additional data point for dense 3D model reconstructions and can be used in applications such as gaming, pointing devices and image stabilization.

Additional use cases include:

• Navigation and stabilization for drones and other unmanned systems and robotics
• Orientation for tracking in fitness and robotics
• Motion detectors and gesture recognition for gaming and robotics
• Rotational tracking for augmented reality and virtual reality head-mounted devices

Units start shipping before the end of this month, just in time for Christmas!!!

This matters if you do projects that involve some kind of gestures, pattern detection or motion-tracking (which someone may tell me are all the same thing … whatever). RealSense is what a lot of developers use now Microsoft no longer makes and sells its Kinect camera/sensors.