from Hacker News

Intel RealSense Stereo Depth Cameras

by 1sembiyan on 3/23/25, 12:36 PM with 65 comments

• by Uehreka on 3/26/25, 6:21 AM

  Back in 2021 I needed some stereo cameras for an AR experience I was building for the 2020 World’s Fair Expo (yes, it took place in 2021 but was called 2020). We looked into RealSense, and right around when we did there was some news that Intel had either laid off the RealSense team or stopped manufacturing new cameras. Whatever it was, it made us look elsewhere, as it does not seem like Intel is serious about developing/maintaining this product line.

  We ended up going with the ZED 2i from Stereolabs (https://www.stereolabs.com/products/zed-2). They work pretty well, my only issue was that their skeletal tracking doesn’t work well if you mount them vertically (which is probably a big ask, the other features do work in vertical orientation though, which was good).

  Stereolabs was pretty active on the software side of things, pushing updates pretty regularly. They’d usually fix a bug within a sprint or two. The hardware is pretty simple, and I find it unsurprising that they’re still selling the ZED 2i at the same price as 4 years ago. It gets the job done, and most of the advancement in the past few years has probably come from throwing more sophisticated AI at the existing stereo video feed.

• by Symmetry on 3/26/25, 12:56 PM

  Long, long ago the the Kinect came out and it was able to provide 3D imaging for robotics companies at an incredibly good pricepoint compared to everything that came before it. Then the company that made it created a version with just the 3D sensor and that was even better.

  But then Apple bought them for what would later become face unlock. Apple wasn't interested in being a component supplier so they discontinued selling sensors to robotics companies and it was a bad time for robotics companies that had incorporated these into their products.

  Into this Intel came with RealSense, with better performance in an even smaller form factor. This was really nice. Then Intel released a garbled statement about discontinuing RealSense in 2024 and everybody freaked out. A lot of companies, like the one I was working at, decided this was the time develop and in-house 3D sensor system.

  Apparently Intel is spinning them out as an independent company, though, so maybe we don't actually have to worry about Intel losing interest and shutting them down.

  https://www.therobotreport.com/intel-spins-out-realsense-as-...

• by IshKebab on 3/26/25, 7:19 AM

  I thought Intel shut down Realsense years ago. It turns out they didn't exactly, and the D421 module is actually a new product. Apparently they're going to spin it out.

  https://www.therobotreport.com/intel-spins-out-realsense-as-...

  $80 is a bargain for that module. I hope they sell them in fewer than 10s though...

• by ftrobro on 3/26/25, 10:10 AM

  I've tried to use Intel RealSense in the past but found the output to be unreliable. I had much better results with Chronoptics KEA:

  https://www.chronoptics.com/products/kea

• by donatj on 3/26/25, 1:34 PM

  If you visit the "Buy" page, in the Breadcrumbs near the top of the page. they seem to be listed under EOL Products. End-of-life I presume, so I think we're late to the party here.

  Am I crazy thinking that seems like a lot of money for what amounts to two webcams in one box? Does the hardware itself do any of the decoding of the stereoscopic image or is that all down to software?

• by omershapira on 3/26/25, 3:02 PM

  I really have to hand it to these companies for making these sensors. They're thin margin, not a sectorial revenue driver, but still fundamental to the industry in a "who else is going to do it?" sort of way.

  Every once in a while an exec will see the first part of the sentence above as a cost optimization opportunity and will set this industry back by years. This is what happened to most Kinects and previous Realsense cameras. And yet they keep coming back, precisely because they are terrible standalone businesses.

• by sand500 on 3/26/25, 5:07 AM

  Is this going to finally replace all the Xbox Kinects everyone uses?

• by aomix on 3/26/25, 1:39 PM

  We had serious reliability issues with USB versions that were only solved by switching to the D457 model with GSML connectors. Those needed other hardware vendors to build in support for it to work but once that was all done we never had an issue again. Happy times going from alerts daily of the camera dropping out to alerts never.

• by johnmarie on 3/26/25, 1:57 PM

  Recommend Zivid cameras instead of Realsense! They are industrial grade, structured light, and more pricy but worth the cost. Super impressive point clouds and 2D. https://www.zivid.com/comparison-point-cloud-quality

• by londons_explore on 3/26/25, 12:18 PM

  Anytime you see something cool with a global shutter (like this does), the next gen of the same thing will use a rolling shutter and be half or less the price.

  Global shutter makes the math of everything easier, and is therefore good for getting a product out the door quicker, but rolling shutter cameras are cheaper and perform better.

• by momoschili on 3/26/25, 5:14 AM

  These have been around since at least 2016 and haven't really made any real waves... it's another technology Intel held out to dry. Stereo is a reliable tech that is relatively simple to implement but for the most part it seems to be have been left behind by other methods that are better suited for compact form factors in consumer like time of flight, or even LIDAR. Intel itself tried its hand at LIDAR, but shuttered the LIDAR real sense cameras in the early 2020s after no success.

  I think the only consumer application where I know of stereo 3D being used is in hobbyist 3D scanners. I'm sure there's some machine vision applications in industrial QC, but besides that not really much else. Maybe in AR/VR but even there it seems ToF is a better match.

• by rurban on 3/27/25, 6:50 AM

  We use their stereo cams for pointclouds, but are not exactly happy about it. Very fragile USB-C transport, the headers are a horrible mess (only fixed in our local fork), their streaming server changed completely (we are still using the old one).

  Lots of my code deals with just realsense resetting, firmware uploading just to unblock comms, restarting or even rebooting the device. And they blocked firmware uploads in their new versions, so you cannot unblock comms anymore without rebooting.

  Not recommended.

• by phkahler on 3/26/25, 1:02 PM

  Range? On the front page is says 60cm to 6m and on the other page is says 0.2m to 2m. That's a 3x difference in the same spec, which is it?

• by thebeardisred on 3/27/25, 3:54 PM

  Attempting to use Intel Real sense cameras on anything but Microsoft Windows has been a fools errand for me. The driver situation is awful and the SDK is annoying too.

• by ycuser2 on 3/26/25, 7:23 AM

  Is it possible to take 180° 3d videos with it?

• by singularity2001 on 3/26/25, 9:26 AM

  Intel® RealSense™ Depth Camera D456 $469.00

  For that price you can get a used iPhone with LIDAR if you don't own one yet?