We ended up going with the ZED 2i from Stereolabs (https://www.stereolabs.com/products/zed-2). They work pretty well, my only issue was that their skeletal tracking doesn’t work well if you mount them vertically (which is probably a big ask, the other features do work in vertical orientation though, which was good).
Stereolabs was pretty active on the software side of things, pushing updates pretty regularly. They’d usually fix a bug within a sprint or two. The hardware is pretty simple, and I find it unsurprising that they’re still selling the ZED 2i at the same price as 4 years ago. It gets the job done, and most of the advancement in the past few years has probably come from throwing more sophisticated AI at the existing stereo video feed.
Everyone has to find out eventually, that unless „product line“ is high-margin CPUs, Intel will cancel it sooner or later. I hope they aren’t stupid enough to do that with their GPUs (again).
People criticise Google for killing products, but Intel has reached a point where their continued existence is threatened by a lack of faith in their ability to continue products without killing them. What lunatic would build on their fab when TSMC exists? And if no one is going to use Intel fabs, then what hope does Intel have to be competitive long term?
They have to keep the GPU part alive, if only to be able to compete with AMD. It's no surprise that both the PS5 and Xbox run on a CPU+GPU combination from AMD - if Intel wants to ever get a share of the console market again (which is admittedly low margin, but extremely high volume to make up for it) they have to be able to match the kind of degree of integration that a modern console requires, and seriously I doubt that Intel will hand over enough knowledge to NVidia to get a competitive offer.
In the non-server general compute market, the situation is similar. The ARM threat all comes with established GPUs as part of the SoC, and so does AMD.
But then Apple bought them for what would later become face unlock. Apple wasn't interested in being a component supplier so they discontinued selling sensors to robotics companies and it was a bad time for robotics companies that had incorporated these into their products.
Into this Intel came with RealSense, with better performance in an even smaller form factor. This was really nice. Then Intel released a garbled statement about discontinuing RealSense in 2024 and everybody freaked out. A lot of companies, like the one I was working at, decided this was the time develop and in-house 3D sensor system.
Apparently Intel is spinning them out as an independent company, though, so maybe we don't actually have to worry about Intel losing interest and shutting them down.
https://www.therobotreport.com/intel-spins-out-realsense-as-...
We built number of projects with the Xbox 360 one back in the day, fun toy.
https://www.therobotreport.com/intel-spins-out-realsense-as-...
$80 is a bargain for that module. I hope they sell them in fewer than 10s though...
Edit: corrected it’s 800 for a 10 pack
https://store.intelrealsense.com/buy-intel-realsense-depth-m...
Am I crazy thinking that seems like a lot of money for what amounts to two webcams in one box? Does the hardware itself do any of the decoding of the stereoscopic image or is that all down to software?
Every once in a while an exec will see the first part of the sentence above as a cost optimization opportunity and will set this industry back by years. This is what happened to most Kinects and previous Realsense cameras. And yet they keep coming back, precisely because they are terrible standalone businesses.
[1] https://www.analog.com/en/resources/evaluation-hardware-and-...
Global shutter makes the math of everything easier, and is therefore good for getting a product out the door quicker, but rolling shutter cameras are cheaper and perform better.
https://www.arducam.com/product/opencv-ai-kit-oak-d-lite-ov7...
I think the only consumer application where I know of stereo 3D being used is in hobbyist 3D scanners. I'm sure there's some machine vision applications in industrial QC, but besides that not really much else. Maybe in AR/VR but even there it seems ToF is a better match.
[0]: https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/intel-says-i...
But the RealSense line are quite commonly seen on a wide variety of robots (maybe specifically those from US-based start-ups) over the past 8 years or so, at least from what I've seen.
Unfortunately it never caught on in other devices. I'd love a more secure face-id kind of thing in my Laptop (Apple, ThinkPad etc.) that authenticates me.
why are the cameras so expensive then? I guess their optics aren't particularly high-grade either.
Intel's RealSense cameras typically also have an active IR illumination component that projects texture onto otherwise featureless surfaces where stereo would not give any measurements.
There is also an onboard vision processor that computes the depth information and sends that to your host system. Compare this with Stereolabs zed cameras that require you to have a separate GPU, supporting CUDA, to compute the depth image stream. Oh, and there is also an inertial measurement unit thrown in, for high frequency inter-frame motion estimation. Useful for things like visual odometey, 3D mapping, etc.
Lots of my code deals with just realsense resetting, firmware uploading just to unblock comms, restarting or even rebooting the device. And they blocked firmware uploads in their new versions, so you cannot unblock comms anymore without rebooting.
Not recommended.
https://www.intelrealsense.com/depth-module-d421/
Right under the top picture of the module it says "Recommended range 0.2 to 2m" meanwhile on the main page linked from HN is says "Ideal Range 60cm to 6m"
So 60cm on the front, but one click away on "Learn More" link, it drops by a factor of 3.
For that price you can get a used iPhone with LIDAR if you don't own one yet?
