Hand tracking not working for Dell Venue 8 7000 with realsense camera

[Zeno_S_]

I am trying to implement a basic hand gesture application as shown in the below tutorial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iB4uF56uxo

using Unity 3D and RealSense SDK.

When I tried to run the application in Dell Venue 8 7000 series which has a realsense camera inbuilt, the tracking is not working.

Is there anything I'm doing wrong?

[Colleen_C_Intel · Accepted solution]

Are you sure it's an F200 in the Dell 8000? If it's just a still shot RealSense camera it's the R100, which does not do gesture tracking nor use the Windows SDK.

[MartyG]

The first thing that comes to mind to ask is whether you are using Unity 5 or 5.1.  Unity 5 is 64 bit, whereas Unity 4.x and earlier were 32 bit.  This means that you need to use the 64 bit version of the RealSense SDK's DLL library files in your Unity project or the camera will not activate.

So here's the fix if you are indeed using Unity 5.  If you are not already using the 64 bit files (you would know if you were, as they have to be manually imported into Unity 5), they are in the SDK folder RSSDK/bin/x64.  Go to the 'Plugins' and 'Plugins.Managed' folders in your project's Assets window and delete the DLL file in each.

Manually copy across from the x64 folder to the 'Plugins' one the file named libpxccpp2c.dll.  Then go to the 'Plugins.Managed' folder and copy across to it the file named libpxcclr.unity.dll.  If you were using Unity 5 and the absence of 64 bit DLL files was the source of your problem, that should fix it.

If you aren't using Unity 5 (i.e you are on an earlier version like 4.6) or you are already using the 64-bit files and it still isn't working, please come back here and we'll take it from there.  :)

Edit: Colleen above posted her response whilst I was writing mine.  Her suggestion about the camera type would have been my second suggestion.

[Zeno_S_]

Thanks for the detailing Marty.

I was using Unity 4.6 and 32 bit Realsense files. So that shouldn't be an issue. 

As Colleen pointed, the issue is with the camera itself. Dell Venue 8 7000 has Realsense snapshot camera(R100) whereas the tutorial is based out of Realsense 3D camera(F200).

Now this leaves me with 2 questions.
1) Can we implement the features of a R100 camera like refocus, distance measurement in a F200 Camera?
2) Can we connect and mount F200 camera externally to the Dell Venue 8 7000 tablet?(thus overriding the default camera to the external camera )

[MartyG]

Although I haven't used distance measurement myself, plenty of others have and so to the best of my knowledge it is no problem with the F200.  As for refocus, I think that may be a feature exclusive to the R200 (the rear-facing mobile version of the camera).  This article by Colleen provides extensive details of what the SDK supports for each camera.

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/new-in-realsense-r3

I would think that your Dell ought to be able to use an external RealSense camera if you disable the internal one in the Device Manager so that there is not a conflict.

If it turns out that you do need refocus and it is indeed exclusive to the R200, the external R200 developer kit camera may be the right choice for you.  It's currently 'out of stock' but coming back soon.

http://click.intel.com/intel-realsense-developer-kit-r200.html

[Zeno_S_]

Thanks again marty! 

The first url you shared has all the details. R200 would suit all my needs assuming it supports all gesture and hand tracking like F200.

However, I would like to highlight that the Dell Venue 8 7000 tablet is a Android device. If I have to interface the R200 with the android tablet, How will I do it by overriding the default camera?

[MartyG]

R200 does not have hand tracking at this time.  It's been stated that features exclusive currently to the F200 may migrate to the R200 and vice versa at some point in time, but at the moment only face tracking is supported in the R200.

Here's another article by Colleen on the R200.

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/realsense-r200-camera

I didn't know that the Venue 8 was an Android tablet.  That complicates things considerably.  It would honestly be easier just to get a new tablet with an R200 built into it than try to do some crazy modding project to swap the camera in a Venue casing.  Whilst there are RealSense tablets of course, the product listings do not specifically state whether they are R200 or the R100, and so I wouldn't like to give any recommendations for particular tablets.  I don't even know if there are any R200 equipped tablets on the market yet.

Also in question is how you would currently get your RealSense app onto an R200-equipped Android tablet.  The Android version of the RealSense SDK is coming soon but is not available right now.  This also adds to my doubts that there are R200-equipped tablets around if the Android SDK is not available yet to make apps for them other than picture-taking ones supplied by the manufacturer.

All things considered, unless you are building an app that really, really needs to be on a tablet then the desktop F200 camera may serve your needs better if you can live without the refocus.