Most of us are familiar with touchless gesture controls, thanks to the efforts of Leap Motion, SoftKinetic, PrimeSense and others. PMD, however, is a name you may not be familiar with, despite the fact that the German firm has been building some of the most accurate and robust depth sensing technology in the world for around a decade. The reason for its low profile? PMD's technology has been used almost exclusively in industrial and automotive settings... until now.
The company began exploring consumer products back in 2009, and we saw its first consumer reference design sensor, the CamBoard Pico, last year at Computex. Now, the company's back with its sensor camera and a new gesture control platform for both Mac and PC, called Nimble UX. Nimble has three parts -- the first, as mentioned, is a depth-sensing camera. Next is the Nimble PMD SDK that gives developers access to the depth information gathered by the sensor and tools to help them build gesture-based applications. Finally, there's the Nimble dashboard, which is a plug-and-play bit of software that implements touchless gesture controls for Windows 8. We got to see Nimble UX for ourselves and chat with the folks from PMD to see what sets their technology apart from the competition, so join us after the break to learn more.
So, you've seen Elon Musk designing rocket parts with the Leap, and you've seen the gaming and hacking powers of Kinect firsthand, too, so what makes PMD's gesture camera technology so special? Well, first off, each of the pixels on the sensor capture depth information by measuring the brightness of the reflected light, as opposed to other solutions that extrapolate and estimate depth information. Those same pixels are also able to subtract ambient light on an individual basis, which enables the sensor to work outdoors or in almost any lighting conditions. Furthermore, each individual pixel also knows when it's not providing the highest quality depth measurements -- and because the Nimble UX provides a depth map to developers, those devs can set differing thresholds of quality for when they choose to use a given pixel's data. Additionally, PMD's sensor solution is fully integrated on a single chip, as opposed to multi-chip designs from elsewhere, which means it's smaller and more efficient in operation.
Source:http://www.engadget.com
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