BERLIN—What is Intel RealSense for, anyway? Here's one idea: it's for hooking up a phablet to a Nerf gun for an augmented/virtual reality shooting game. We got to check it out a little here at the IFA trade show.
Intel and Google announced their cooperation on a 3D-mapping phone at Intel's IDF conference a few weeks ago, but Wednesday's demo had a lot more consumer punch than just telling people they can map the inside of their homes with their phones.
Intel's Tango demo featured a Nerf blaster equipped with Bluetooth, which let you navigate a pretty standard shooter game, except that moving around in the physical world also moved around in the virtual world. It's not augmented reality, because it doesn't bring real-life items into the virtual shooter world, Intel's demo guy explained. And it's not virtual reality, because elements of the physical world would affect the virtual world—for instance, you wouldn't be encouraged to fall down a real flight of stairs. It's something new and different.
The Tango smartphone itself is a pretty standard 6-inch phablet running Android, albeit festooned with six cameras on the back. That opens up the perpetual question of how Intel is doing in smartphones; it doesn't have its Atom processors in very many smartphones in the U.S., with the Asus ZenFones being the notable exception.
Kirk Skaugen, the general manager of Intel's client computing group, said the company is seeing success in the "China technology ecosystem," especially with tablet vendors who are now also developing phone businesses.
"These are companies, when I was a PC-only guy, I didn't know," Skaugen said. "That's the way we're advancing in the phone market." He pointed out Water World Technology as one partner, for instance.