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PMD's Nimble UX platform gives computers super accurate touchless gesture controls
Most of us are familiar with touchless gesture controls, thanks to the efforts of Leap Motion, SoftKinetic, PrimeSense and others. PMD, however, is a name you may not be familiar with, despite the fact that the German firm has been building some of the most accurate and robust depth sensing technology in the world for around a decade. The reason for its low profile? PMD's technology has been used almost exclusively in industrial and automotive settings... until now. The company began exploring consumer products back in 2009, and we saw its first consumer reference design sensor, the CamBoard Pico, last year at Computex. Now, the company's back with its sensor camera and a new gesture control platform for both Mac and PC, called Nimble UX. Nimble has three parts -- the first, as mentioned, is a depth-sensing camera. Next is the Nimble PMD SDK that gives developers access to the depth information gathered by the sensor and tools to help them build gesture-based applications. Finally, there's the Nimble dashboard, which is a plug-and-play bit of software that implements touchless gesture controls for Windows 8. We got to see Nimble UX for ourselves and chat with the folks from PMD to see what sets their technology apart from the competition, so join us after the break to learn more.
PMD and Infineon to enable tiny integrated 3D depth cameras (hands-on)
After checking out SoftKinetic's embedded 3D depth camera earlier this week, our attention was brought to a similar offering coming from Germany's PMD Technologies and Infineon. In fact, we were lucky enough to be the first publication to check out their CamBoard Pico S, a smaller version of their CamBoard Pico 3D depth camera that was announced in March. Both reference designs are already available in low quantities for manufacturers and middleware developers to tinker with over USB 2.0, so the two companies had some samples up and running at their demo room just outside Computex. %Gallery-190502%
Fruit Ninja meets real Ninja with CamBoard's Pico gesture camera (video)
You can play Fruit Ninja with your fingertips, you can play it with your eyes, so it's reasonable enough that hand waving should control it too. And while gesture-sensing technology is hardly new, Teutonic outfit pmdtechnologies has been teasing a miniaturized edition of its depth camera that's ripe for embedding into small consumer electronics devices. All we've got so far is a short video (after the break) outlining its potential, but that's enough to hope someone can go head-to-head with Microsoft in the space.
