Mac & Linux

[Tommy_A_]

There is a  previous thread about cross platform support in the forum. It is nasty, brutish and short, so I prefer not to bump it up. Instead, I will relate the most frequently recurring question I've been getting the last few days, after showing off my own RealSense-based demo: "What about Mac and Linux?", with emphasis on Mac.

What I can tell people right now is that

1. No, Mac is not currently supported. Some enthusiasts have been hacking up Linux support, Intel has a history of supporting Linux, and RealSense is already running on Android, so that looks promising.
2. Whether Apple would choose to support RealSense looks more like a political issue than a technical one. Their hardware is certainly capable of running the software, but they have their own related technology and patents, and may want to proceed on their own.

That tends to elicit frowns. So, if I could get a wish, it would be an announcement from Intel that "yes, we are in fact working with Apple to make RealSense available on Mac" or, failing that, an industry effort to come up with a standard, along the same lines as OpenGL, Vulkan etc. Maybe a job for the Khronos Group?

[MartyG]

It's an interesting debate, Tommy.  Whilst the Windows SDK download is over 1 gb, one wonders what you could strip out to reduce it down to the handful of vital files to focus on for porting.  I would imagine that it might boil down to a small number of DLL library files, given that the camera only needs a few files to integrate RealSense into platforms such as Unity and Processing (files such as libpxccpp2 and libpxcclr.unity (the Unity version of the library file)   .

The non-Unity C# and C++ sample applications could probably be recompiled for Linux and Mac quite quickly.  But since they make specific calls to the contents of the DLL, recompiling them might be like copying out the Klingon dictionary - you can see the words but they aren't necessarily going to mean anything to you.  Likewise, if a port of the library files wasn't practically the same as the originals then the recompiled samples would likely crash immediately.

It would be cool if someone could make a port for Mac.  Until there was an official set of drivers though, it would probably only appeal to hobbyists like those who hacked Kinect to use with PC before there was official support from Microsoft for it.  Companies would prefer to wait for the official version before investing in supporting it on Mac, unless using it as an internal development tool.

Edit: an example of a use of RealSense as a development tool is to produce animated cartoons and game cut-scene videos by constructing RealSense-powered avatars to represent characters and acting out of the body and mouth movements live and recording it, instead of having to go through the laborious process of creating it frame by frame.  Here's a video of my RealSense avatar as an example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGGlbc0yk2E