Cross platform support

[michael_f_1]

I have just suffered through your miserable sign-up process to tell you that I won't be using your SDK. You know that chaining your hardware to a single platform makes it super unattractive to developers right? And that one platform is Windows 8, are you kidding me? If you had to choose one platform, let it be OSX. Apple's users have a demonstrated ability to spend money. Seriously, when no one develops for your platform this will have been the reason.

[samontab]

This is just what I think, not an official response from Intel, so it can be totally wrong.

I understand what you say. I would like to have a cross platform SDK as well, but I can see why it is only available for Win8.1, and why probably there aren't any plans for making it cross platform.

First, the SDK covers many, many things, not just a raw 3D camera. They rely for example on third party software that probably only runs on Windows, like the speech synthesis and recognition. Also, they have face detection, object tracking, and many other things. These other parts of the SDK push the requirements to be what they currently are, Win8.1 64 bits. And I don't think they will try to port all the SDK into other OS, as it would be really difficult.

Second, they want developers to make games and apps using this camera, and windows is still the number one platform for games. Although I prefer Linux for development, I understand why they want to support Windows.

And finally, probably they might have some deals with manufacturers of laptops where they want their cameras embedded that come with Windows, so it just makes sense for Intel to support Windows. This is not meant to be an accessory like the kinect, this camera was designed to be embedded on other devices.

Having said that, they showed an autonomous drone running a sample with a few realsense cameras, and that drone was using Linux as the underlying OS, so probably the raw depth capabilities, not the full SDK, are available in all systems. At least under Linux it seems to work, and probably Mac as well. Although, I don't think Intel would like to publish this subset of the SDK officially....