You're saying it uses time-of-flight of light? Do you have more information about that because it seems awfully unlikely.

It does seem unlikely, doesn't it? Nevertheless it's true: we now have the ability to build cameras that measure the distance to each pixel by timing laser light bounces. Intel sells one too: http://forum.libcinder.org/topic/future-is-here-time-of-flig... http://www.interhacktive.org/1/post/2013/01/intel-creative-d...

The fact that that's possible at the scale of what appears to be centimeters is mindblowing.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking too- but apparently the tech's been around for awhile:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-of-flight_camera

the tech is around, but at very high price (a normal pointing laser costs 2k~3k, a proper lidar costs 30k to 70k). I think that is what the parent comment means "very unlikely".

PrimeSense (the company behind the Kinect IR technology) had a competitor at the time called 3DV systems (or something like that), that made an RGBD TOF camera that worked way, way better than the kinect - but they ran into financing problems, and were bought at-cost by Microsoft (something like $30M, which was the investment). That was in 2007, and even back then they were able to produce them for ~$300/BOM if I remember correctly.

At the time, everyone assumed MS just bought them to shut out competitors - but it appears they actually use the thing.

The company was Canesta. ToF sensors were their thing. [1]

Microsoft bought them in 2010, and it seems like they finally got their tech integrated (and cut Primesense out in the process).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canesta

And I was thinking about 3DV Systems' [1] product called ZCam [2]. I wasn't aware of the Canesta deal - apparently, MS cornered the market of depth cameras. Personally, I think this deserves some kind of regulatory anti-trust action. But that's just me.

[1] http://venturebeat.com/2009/02/21/sources-confirm-microsoft-... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZCam

The Intel Time of Flight SDK camera is $150 http://forum.libcinder.org/topic/future-is-here-time-of-flig...

Thanks! I am looking into this space for a while for my personal project. but 1m~3m distance is too small to my application. Do you know if this is plausible for direct sunlight and anyway to improve the distance?

It's not explicitly measuring the time from emission to reception of individual pulses, that would be (pretty much) impossible with light. Instead, it sends out periodic pulses of light, and measures the phase offset of the lighting of resulting images.

Not visible light but infrared

How does using TOF instead of IR prevent shadowing? Unless it can see through you, it's still just going to have a single depth map producing gaps wherever it can't see, right?

A mistake I made in my excitement. TOF and structured light can both produce shadow regions of the depth map if set up like the previous kinect. What it looks like they have done is to switch the places of the RGB camera and the IR projector, which reduces the shadowing effect. Here's a Skitch of what I am talking about: http://i.imgur.com/y6VkRBm.png.