On Thursday, September 16, 2021 at 4:22:41 PM UTC-7 Mark Johnston wrote:
I don't feel it replaces realsense. The true IR depth feature of realsense is the added value there.
I'm going to be a bit more bullish and say "Doesn't replace the Realsense...yet"
The one thing the OAK-series cameras have over the Realsense is that it's programmable.
It comes with ImageNet, MobileNet and YOLO_v4 flashed onto the camera as a *demo*.
I've been running the ROS YOLO node on the OAK-D on Tenacity and if I just want to subscribe to the detected_objects topic I can.
I don't need the firehose of image & depth data unless I want it. So I don't actually need to splash out for a Jetson Xavier if I don't want to.
The camera is taking care of all of that for me. To me that makes active IR Depth projectors a feature that gets dropped in a "Pro" version of the OAK next time.
There is a whole sub-category of devices like the OAK breaking out right now and it's all coming from small, hacker & engineer-driven companies like Luxonis(makers of the OAK), OpenMV, Firefly, etc.
and not Intel that I think are going to be super-interesting for a lot of us. Not all of them do depth-sensing, but not all applications require that.
To me if I were to consider pushing to have this Oak camera in a real product (such as Magni) I would never touch Intel RealSense as they have a very long record of dropping the nitch product that some group of their engineers put out. Yes, they can be very cool but Intel drops those thing on the floor unless there is real volume in a product.
There's a LOT of robot companies that are using the D435i in their
robots and have based their entire vision pipeline around Realsense, so it's being used in a lot of robots.
Still, Intel is like that
boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse who almost dumps you but things get ironed
out and you're back together now and it's all supposed to be happy
and settled but somewhere deep in the back of your head, you just know you're going they're going to dump you anyway.
So maybe now is the time to start looking around to see what else is out there.
'dillo