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Touching virtual reality with Nimble VR's Sense camera
Every time I use virtual reality headsets, I find new limitations. Now that I'm finally "inside" a virtual world, I want to explore. I want to touch things and feel them respond. I want to speak and have my voice heard inside the virtual world. I want to see my hands represented virtually, and I want to be able to use them as I do in real life. I very much doubt I'm alone in this -- the latest Oculus Rift dev kit has a dedicated USB port on top of the headset explicitly for peripherals that intend to solve these issues. I spent an hour last week with one such device: the Nimble Sense camera from Nimble VR.
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.
