A New Era of Human-Computer Interaction: Celebrating Developer Innovation

As we reflect on the 50th anniversary of Moore’s Law, we stand at the threshold of a personal computing revolution. New user interface solutions such as head-mounted displays and Intel® RealSense™ technology are transforming human-computer interaction. There are plenty of other examples in the industry – for example Google Glass, Facebook’s investment in Oculus, and Microsoft’s HoloLens. We are witnessing the blending of the real world and the digital, and that is truly exciting.

I have been struck by the potential of these technologies, not just for entertainment, but for practical applications. At CES we showed how Intel RealSense cameras worn around the body can help a vision impaired person navigate the world or help drones navigate obstacles. I have seen how immersive displays can guide a person through a complex home repair or put an astronomer on another world. Imagine how these capabilities for immersion and instruction could impact education and industry.

Intel RealSense technology enables new usage models by bringing the capabilities to see and hear the real world to everything from PCs, laptops, and tablets to wearables, drones and more. Just a few weeks ago at IDF Shenzhen we unveiled a prototype smartphone with a new, long-range Intel RealSense depth camera built in. But a technology only reaches true scale when developers are able to create ground-breaking experiences with it. This is a major technology transition with the potential to change lives and create new business value. Intel® Software is committed to helping developers to lean into this transformation and accelerate the pace of user experience innovation for everyone.

To that end, Intel President Renee James announced the Intel RealSense App Challenge last year at Computex. The goal was to engage new developers on the technology, take existing developers to the next level, and create inspirational applications. I was excited by the response – more than 7000 software creators across 37 countries applied to compete, with 400 selected to develop new applications for entertainment, learning, collaboration, and more. Today we announced the winners, who come from the US, Canada, Brazil, UK, China, Ukraine, Germany, Indonesia and beyond.

This competition has been part of a broad effort to grow the Intel RealSense ecosystem globally and create a software innovation pipeline around it. Intel Software strives to create and foster diverse ecosystems of developers around new technologies such as this. We give developers a head start with the Intel RealSense Software Development Kit (SDK), which includes free tools, examples, and application programing interfaces (APIs). We provide developers with expert guidance and access to communities of like-minded creators at our Intel® Developer Zone. We constantly challenge them to raise the bar of what is possible.

The finalists of the Challenge certainly did that.  Many of the applications demonstrated an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the experiences RealSense technology can enable. It was tough to narrow these down to just a few winners, and I encourage you to check out the full list. I would especially like to congratulate our Grand Prize winners.

The $100,000 Grand Prize winner for the Ambassador track (for existing Intel RealSense developers) went to Brazilian developer Alexandre Ribeiro da Silva of Anima Games. The game, called “Seed,” made excellent use of the Intel RealSense gesture capabilities to guide a floating seed through its journey to reforest a devastated land.


Seed from Alexandre Ribeiro da Silva of Anima Games

The $50,000 Grand Prize winner for the Pioneer track (for those new to Intel RealSense applications) went to Canadian developer David Schnare of Kinetisense. This application, called OrthoSense, uses Intel RealSense to help medical professionals remotely rehabilitate a patient who has suffered a hand injury by tracking their range of movement over time. This practical applicat