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.
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.
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.