Intel Perceptual Computing SDK 2013
Hey folks,
As some of you guys know, I took a bit of a break from the content creation side of things a little under a year ago to try my hand at hardware and middleware development at Intel. Well, we just recently made our first products available to developers, our Perceptual Computing SDK and the Creative Interactive Gesture Camera, and I thought this might be of interest to the Tech Art community.
So what is “Perceptual Computing?” In a nutshell, Perceptual Computing is giving the computer senses akin to our own. Ok, ok, I know that sounds like marketing copy, so what does it really mean? Well, the Perceptual Computing SDK is a set of interfaces that provide developers with easy access to features such as gesture and hand pose recognition, fingertip tracking, face and landmark tracking, voice and speech recognition, and AR style object tracking. If you’ve ever used OpenCV or something similar to do face recognition or any other Haar style tracking, you’re probably already familiar with the concepts; our SDK abstracts away all the technical details of these classes of operations and lets developers get right to the important part, which is…well, developing! Additionally, we provide support for C#, Unity3D, processing(http://processing.org), openFrameworks(http://openframeworks.cc), and Cinder(http://libcinder.org) , so whether your building desktop apps, games, or interactive installations, we’ve got you covered. Can’t announce or promise anything specifically in public yet, but yes, we are definitely looking at other game engines, frameworks, and languages, so if it’s not supported yet, chances are it will be in the next year or so. 
We also provide the Creative Interactive Gesture Camera, which is a Time-of-Flight 3d/depth camera that integrates seamlessly with our SDK. Think of it as a smaller, lower power Kinect that works at close range (>.5m-1.5m). Kinect isn’t TOF, but for all intents and purposes, it’s a fair comparison. Granted, some of the features of the SDK (face/landmarks, AR tracking) will work with a standard webcam, but the real magic happens when we combine the SDK and the Gesture Camera. Our asking price is $150 (which is a steal considering most ‘consumer’ TOF solutions range from 1 to 2k), but if someone’s really interested and is put off by the price, email me([email protected]) and we can probably work something out :nod:
So that’s the pitch, we’d love to get some Tech Artist and VFX Artist eyes and hands on the technology. I’m not sure right away how useful this tech would be for game tools and pipelines, but if I know anything about Tech Artists, it’s that you guys come up with all kinds of crazy, creative solutions, and you love new toys :laugh: Swing by the site, check out our offerings, feel free to email me about anything, hope to see some cool work from you guys. If you stuck with it this far, thanks for reading!
