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Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

Your best bet is probably to order cheap IR or color industrial cameras and use stereo block matching. It's implemented in OpenCV and works okay-ish. For example, Basler dart USB3 cameras can be synchronized through the IO expension port.

That said, maybe it's time for someone to produce a good replacement. In my opinion, the RealSense was always quite pricey when compared with what it could do, especially now that we can just run AI algorithms on the edge.

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There is no way this is a replacement for the RealSense depth cameras. These are USB, bus powered, factory calibrated, cameras doing the block matching in an ASIC. Often with an IR projector to help the matching. This like saying, oh well, I can’t find a GPU, so I’ll just compile Mesa for the CPU and my product will be fine.

Put an NVIDIA Jetson Nano in between and you also have hardware matching.

IR projector is $19: https://www2.mouser.com/ProductDetail/ams/AQAA-20?qs=DRkmTr7...

This seems a little bit like claiming that while you can't deliver an aircraft carrier right now, you do have several canoes available and since they both float it's basically the same thing.

Yes and no. Of course, a homemade module like this will be way less polished than a RealSense camera. But on the other hand, it'll be more flexible and possibly tailored to your problem. So a homemade module might actually have better performance.

That one only has 4700 dots, which severely limits the potential applications. The one in the iPhone face scanner has 30,000 dots. (Last time I looked, it was very hard to source IR projectors that you could use to make a reasonably accurate depth camera.)

It has about 5500 dots so it should be similar to the projector inside a RealSense D435.

That's like saying instead of riding in a car, you are going to get a wheelbarrow and be pulled by an even bigger car. It's absurd to say that is a replacement.

Not quite. It's like instead of buying a car, you buy wheels and a frame and do a car mechanic training. With a bit of effort and skill, you'll end up with a car, but it won't look like a factory-produced car.

There is no universe where what you described ends up being similar to an integrated product with a dedicated ASIC. What you are saying is a stab in the dark that isn't backed up by real results.

Quite a lot of hobbyists are going that route instead of purchasing a RealSense camera:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfklQ-O-FPc

Also, I believe Amazon went that way when designing their DeepRacer. Note that it has no IR projector but 2 Cameras and a commodity PC for processing.

Those results are not even remotely close to Intel's cameras let alone the azure kinect, yet it will be much more power hungry.

The resolution, noise, frame rate and even consistency (notice the flashing) is a tiny fraction of basic hardware solutions.

There are plenty of other 3D depth cameras out there, just not with the brand recognition of Intel, and now the quick and easy purchase of one unit at $200USD.

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