A combined 2-D and 3-D camera from Intel will be built into laptops and tablets from a range of manufacturers, the company announced at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) on Monday. The camera allows a device to be controlled with arm, hand, and finger gestures, and is also intended to allow software to capture and understand the world around it, including people’s facial expressions.
“We see and touch in 3-D, so why do we have to use computers in 2-D?” asked Mooly Eden, general manager of Intel’s Perceptual Computing Group, before unveiling the new depth-sensing technology, called the Intel RealSense 3-D camera.
We had a tip about, and have now confirmed, Intel’s latest acquisition: Kno, the education startup that started life as a hardware business and later pivoted into software — specifically via apps that let students read interactive versions of digitized textbooks.
As personal computer sales continue to shrink, chip giant Intel has set its sights on remaking data centers, powering laptops that convert into tablets and expanding its beachhead in the mobile device market.
That’s the message Intel Chief Executive Brian Krzanich delivered at the Intel Capital Global Summit late last month in San Diego.
“That’s our strategy, to drive every segment,” Krzanich said.
Intel is a $53-billion-a-year company that enjoys a near monopoly on the computer chips that go into PCs. But when it comes to the data underlying big companies like Facebook and Google, it says it wants to “return power to the people.”
At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, chipmaker Intel demoed its latest big idea: “perceptual computing.”
At first glance, it looks like little more than a me-too version of Microsoft’s Kinect: clip a camera-like peripheral onto your Ultrabook, and presto, instant gestural interface!
This month, Intel unveiled a Wi-Fi radio almost completely made of the same sort of transistors that go into one of its microprocessors.
At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Yorgis Palaskas, research lead in radio integration at Intel and the company's chief technology officer, Justin Rattner, also showed off a system-on-a-chip that sported this digital Wi-Fi radio nestled up next to a couple of its Atom processors for mobile devices.
