NEW YORK: Intel’s Real Sense 3D camera, designed to add 3D interactions to PCs, tablets and smartphones, is finally getting real. The chip maker has been banging the Real Sense drum for a few years now, as part of its strategy to keep itself young and vibrant now that its traditional PC business is, shall we say, maturing.
Here at the Computex geek fest in Taipei, Real Sense is finally starting to take off with device makers.
The All-in-One PC that Asus just launched at Computex has a Real Sense camera, as do computers from Dell, NEC, HP and Lenovo. Intel says it’s now had around 50 “design wins” for Real Sense (devices that are going to embed the camera), of which around half have just appeared on the market, or will be appearing here at Computex.
One of the first applications for Real Sense will be user authentication. As part of Windows 10, which Microsoft has just announced will be available July 29, users will be able to log into their computer just by sitting in front of it. The 3D Real Sense camera built into the bezel, combined with a new Windows 10 feature known as “Hello”, will scan the user’s head in three dimensions, and compare that scan with the 3D image already on file.
It’s not completely spoof-proof. Someone could still don a face mask that looks exactly like you and possibly fool the cameras that way, Intel engineers admit. But it’s a lot spoof proofier than regular 2D face scanning authentication, which only require a photo rather than a 3D object.
(This ignores any other factors that are built into the authentication, whether it’s 2D or 3D, such as a requirement that the object in front of the camera is animate, or that it gives off infrared heat.)
All in all there are now around 75 applications that take advantage of Real Sense, Intel says, including: video conferencing apps, that use 3D information to separate the speaker from his or her background, so he or she can appear in the videoconference without everyone else seeing how untidy their surroundings are; 3D printing services, that use the 3D scanner to create 3D models of your head that could then be sent to printer and turned into life-like garden gnomes, or into those busts you see in cemeteries (I just made those two examples up, but why not?); video games, where all the participants scan their faces in 3D onto their avatars, so they get to kill and be killed by their friends.
