[momoschili]

These have been around since at least 2016 and haven't really made any real waves... it's another technology Intel held out to dry. Stereo is a reliable tech that is relatively simple to implement but for the most part it seems to be have been left behind by other methods that are better suited for compact form factors in consumer like time of flight, or even LIDAR. Intel itself tried its hand at LIDAR, but shuttered the LIDAR real sense cameras in the early 2020s after no success.

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.

[krasin]

RealSense is a golden standard in Robotics research. ALOHA, which was one of the first swallows of the new AI+Robotics wave, was enabled by RealSense: https://aloha-2.github.io/

[whilenot-dev]

I'm confused, didn't Intel wind down the RealSense business 2021?[0]

[0]: https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/intel-says-i...

[perching_aix]

Wow, I could have sworn that was a fake domain banking on r and n being homoglyphs when part of a repetition, but no, CRN is a real publication.

[momoschili]

only the non-stereo realsense was killed. The stereo device was kept along for the ride

[gertlex]

There certainly hasn't been a consumer use case for these.

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.

[grumbelbart2]

There are some use-cases that Apple pioneered. After they bought Primesense, who made the first Kinect using quite interesting structured IR laser light points and a single camera to get depth, Apple shrank that technology. It is now the core of FaceID where it does a 3D scan of your face. On the backside of iPhones, Apple is using LIDAR to estimate depth, allowing improved computational photography.

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.

[gertlex]

Ahh yeah! That's true. I was solely thinking the realsense cameras and their general form factor not having consumer use.

Relatedly: A decade ago, where I worked, and around the time Primesense was getting bought (I think, without double checking), we bought about 250 Primesense cameras so we could build a bunch of robots with them before having to change what camera was used.

[ofrzeta]

> Stereo is a reliable tech that is relatively simple to implement

why are the cameras so expensive then? I guess their optics aren't particularly high-grade either.

[dcanelhas]

Going to assume you're genuinely interested here:

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.

[ofrzeta]

> Going to assume you're genuinely interested here

Sure I am! Thanks for the information.

[fxtentacle]

One part that surely drives up the price is that they use global shutter sensors. These are typically reserved for DSLRs. Smartphones use much cheaper rolling shutter sensors. But that's also the reason why smartphone pictures get distorted when you move the camera too much. These distortions would make 3D triangulation impossible.