New Intel RealSense D435i Stereo Depth Camera Adds 6 Degrees of Freedom Tracking

What’s New: Intel today introduced a new addition to the Intel® RealSense™ D400 series: the Intel RealSense Depth Camera D435i. This latest Intel RealSense camera includes a new inertial measurement unit (IMU) that enables developers to create solutions with more advanced depth-sensing and tracking capabilities for applications including drones, robotics and gaming.

“Intel RealSense technology is used to build products that enrich people’s lives through devices and machines that perceive the world in 3D. With the addition of the IMU, the RealSense D435i enables developers to tackle a new set of challenges related to tracking movement and depth.”
– Sagi Ben Moshe, vice president and general manager, Intel RealSense Group

How It’s Different: The Intel RealSense D435i is the next evolution of the Intel RealSense D435 camera, adding 6 degrees of freedom data from an internal IMU that combines a variety of linear accelerometers with gyroscopes to detect both rotation and translation for three axes, as well as pitch, yaw and roll. For advanced scanning, the IMU provides an extra set of data allowing for dense reconstruction, and provides more reference so the camera doesn’t lose tracking. For example, in robotics, the robotics operating system provides not only vision but position data.

The Intel RealSense D435i runs on the open source Intel RealSense SDK 2.0, which now includes support for the IMU and enables fast, easy development across several programming languages so developers can quickly create prototypes to interact with real or virtual environments.

Why It’s Important: The Intel RealSense D435i provides an extra set of data for developers to create applications with more advanced depth-sensing and tracking in the same 90 mm x 25 mm x 25 mm form factor as the original Intel RealSense D435 Depth Camera. The built-in IMU provides an additional data point for dense 3D model reconstructions and can be used in applications such as gaming, pointing devices and image stabilization. Additional use cases include:

• Navigation and stabilization for drones and other unmanned systems and robotics
• Orientation for tracking in fitness and robotics
• Motion detectors and gesture recognition for gaming and robotics
• Rotational tracking for augmented reality and virtual reality head-mounted devices

When You Can Get It: The Intel RealSense D435i camera is available for pre-order now. It will begin shipping Nov. 26.