RealSense on embedded systems possible?

[Efreet1]

Hello I'm a developer from US very interested in using the RealSense technology.

RealSense camera and SDK seems to require powerful OS and processor, but is it possible to use it on any current embedded devices?

Thank you for any input.

[MartyG]

I would imagine that the new R200 version of the camera, designed for tablets, would be suited more to embeddable devices, as it is compatible with the Intel Atom CPU used widely in embeddable devices.  Like the F200 desktop camera, it is available in a developer-kit format.

https://software.intel.com/en-us/realsense/devkit

Edit: this page says that support for the Atom is "coming soon".

[Efreet1]

Thank you for your answer Marty!

Has anyone had success with other OS's, such as Android or QNX? According to the spec (the link from Marty's reply), only Windows 8.1 is supported, but since it's possible to develop with Eclipse or Unity, I wonder if the camera functions rely strictly on Windows or they could work on the other OS's for embedded devices as well.

Thank you.

[MartyG]

Intel are working on an Android version of the RealSense SDK at the moment.

Porting to other OS is a hot topic on this forum at the moment,  People naturally want Mac OSX and Linux versions as well, and are considering whether it would be feasible for themselves or somebody else to develop unofficial adaptations for their preferred platform, similar to how PC fans of Kinect on Xbox 360 hacked the camera for use on Windows as a hobbyist development tool and made the concept wildly popular, encouraging Microsoft to  introduce an official SDK for doing so.

(Speaking of which, Microsoft have just withdrawn the Windows-specific Kinect 2 For Windows camera and SDK and are now supplying only the Xbox One version of Kinect 2, with an additional $50 adapter so it'll work on PCs.)

Here's an example of such a post from today.

https://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/topic/548968

As for whether the current camera drivers would work on another machine like OSX if used in a Unity application, I highly doubt it.  The camera's DLL library files are very keyed to a specific chip architecture (Intel Core 4th Generation Haswell and newer) and refuse to work in Unity with older-generation Intel CPUs like the 3rd Gen Ivy Bridge and 2nd Gen Sandy Bridge.

iMacs have an Intel Core processor but as far as I can recall, people who tried to run the camera on such machines had no luck, indicating that it's not just a matter of hardware but operating system as well.