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Exclusive: PMD's CamBoard Pico XS is the tiniest gesture camera we've ever seen (video)
Just as we were wrapping up CES today, we caught up with our friends over at PMD Technologies who surprised us with a little exclusive. What you see above is the new CamBoard Pico XS gesture camera that's dwarfed by the Pico S -- the one we saw at Computex -- next to it. This tiny module is only 4mm thick, 39.5mm long and 15.5mm wide, making it 1.5mm thinner and almost half as long as its predecessor, while still packing the same Infineon IRS1010C 3D image sensor chip. Given the size plus the fact that it already uses MIPI (Mobile Industry Processor Interface) instead of USB, the Pico XS is truly integration-ready for OEMs. The main changes that enabled this size reduction are the smaller lens -- which is compensated by a sharper laser illumination (but still 850nm infrared) -- plus the removal of the aluminum heat sink (which is actually the chassis), courtesy of a much lower power consumption. Instead of a typical 1W you get on the Pico S, the Pico XS requires less than 50mW typically (at 25fps) and 350mW max (up to 45fps). Temperature-wise it goes up by just 10 degrees Celsius at most, apparently. Despite the slightly reduced viewing angles, we've been told that this smaller depth camera offers the same performance as before. That certainly seems to be the case after this author tried it using PMD's Nimble UX middleware (co-developed by 3Gear Systems), which is able to do two-hand skeletal tracking down to finger level, as shown in our video after the break.
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.
