Realsense ZR300 on Windows

[AVeli1]

Hello!

Does someone know, when realsense SDK on Windows will support camera ZR300? Or this camera is only supported on Linux?

Thanks,

Alexander.

[MartyG]

For the moment, Linux and Librealsense is the primary means to use the ZR300 camera. I have no knowledge of whether Intel has plans to support it in the main RealSense SDK in Windows 10.

You can also interface the ZR300 with Windows 10 IoT Core, the version of Windows 10 that specializes in connecting to devices via the Internet of Things (IoT). In order to do this though, you have to purchase an Intel Joule "compute unit" and plug the ZR300 into that instead of plugging it into a full Windows 10 PC.

This forum discussion may be useful to you.

[AVeli1]

Thank you for your reply.

Unfortunately, it's necessary for my project to use ZR300 on Windows 10 (not IoT).

Is librealsense available on Windows 10? Is there any other possibilities to use ZR300 on windows 10?

[MartyG]

Librealsense claims to be usable on Windows. I get the sense that it's awkward to set up, but the option is there. The instructions seem to say that Librealsense has to be compiled in Visual Studio.

https://github.com/IntelRealSense/librealsense/blob/master/doc/installation_windows.md librealsense/installation_windows.md at master · IntelRealSense/librealsense · GitHub

[AVeli1]

But, as I understand, librealsense doesn't support person tracking and some other features.

Here is a list of features supported (from Github):

1. Native streams: depth, color, infrared and fisheye.
2. Synthetic streams: rectified images, depth aligned to color and vice versa, etc.
3. Intrinsic/extrinsic calibration information.
4. Majority of hardware-specific functionality for individual camera generations (UVC XU controls).
5. Multi-camera capture across heterogeneous camera architectures (e.g. mix R200 and F200 in same application)
6. Motion-tracking sensors acquisition (ZR300 only)

So, is it possible, that ZR300 will be supported on next windows rssdk? I need at least person skeleton tracking.

[MartyG]

I have no insight into Intel's plans for the next version of the official SDK. I would suspect though that the ZR300 will be supported, given that Intel has provided support in its SDK for all the previous cameras. In the past, support for a new camera in the SDK tended to start around the time that a new camera goes on sale.

The ZR300 has been somewhat of an exception to this rule though, as the Librealsense developers created support for it well before the ZR300 developer kit went on sale in the Intel store. Although the USB developer kit is new, the camera has been out in the wild for a while (for example, in developer preview versions of the cancelled Smartphone Developer Kit, an Android smartphone with a ZR300 in it)

The initial batch of ZR300 pre-orders in the Intel store shipped in March, and the next batch of orders is due to ship in April. So if the ZR300 is going to be supported in the official SDK (again, I have no knowledge of this, only speculation), I would think that the next SDK version would have that support. SDKs up to 2016 R2 had support for some R200-only modes, so it's feasible that ZR300-only modes could likewise be supported.

The official SDK and Librealsense do not precisely mirror each other's features. There are some things the official SDK can do that Librealsense cannot, and vice versa. So I don't know what ZR300 features supported in Librealsense will be supported in a future RealSense SDK. Given that Person Tracking has already been developed for R200 in the official SDK though, it seems a possibility that similar support for the ZR300 would be present. There are no guarantees though, since some features present up til 2016 R2 such as Blob Tracking and speech recognition were removed in 2016 R3.