RealSense is Intel's 3D camera initiative for bringing face recognition, gesture control, speech input, and augmented reality to the PC. Its closest analogy would be Microsoft's Kinect for Windows. The technology has been presented at Intel keynotes for a while now, embodied in the "Intel Perceptual Computing SDK 2013" under its "Perceptual Computing" initiative.
Since August 31st, that has been removed from their site and replaced with the Intel RealSense SDK. While the software is free, you will probably need compatible hardware to do anything useful. None is available yet, but the "Intel RealSense Developer Kit" hardware (not to be confused with the "Intel RealSense SDK", which is software) is available for reservation at Intel's website. The camera is manufactured by Creative Labs and will cost $99. They are also very clear that this is a developer tool, and forbid it from being used in "mission critical applications". Basically, don't trust your life on it, or the lives and health of any other(s) or anything.
The developer kit will be available for many regions: the US, Canada, much of Europe, Brazil, India, China, Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, New Zealand, Australia, Russia, Israel, and Singapore.
How about a 6 core laptop SKU
How about a 6 core laptop SKU initiative, that’s what would demonstrate some initiative, a 6 core laptop SKU, not an ultrabook SKU, a regular laptop SKU with plenty of power, as much as can be had in a regular laptop form factor. how well has Kinect done, and the UltraBook initiative! How about some love for the laptop gamers, and graphics folks, with a few 6 core SKUs, some with integrated, and some without, for the discrete GPU gamers/graphics on the high end.
Intel were previously selling
Intel were previously selling a rebranded SoftKinetic DepthSense 325, a rather nice time-of-flight depth camera. Unfortunately it looks like ‘RealSense’ is based off of technology acquired when Intel purchased InVision, who were working on Structured Light depth sensors, which are less robust and can’t do some of the fun things time-of-flight sensors can (like volumetric depth maps of/through fog and other translucent materials). Notable, the Kinect 1 used Structured Light depth sensing (from Primesense), but the Kinect 2 switched to time-of-flight.