The company has also announced a development kit to help researchers prototype machine vision applications based on the new chip.
(Click here for a larger image of the chip)According to Canesta, the Equinox chip resolves a scene into pixels as does an ordinary camera chip, but instead of simply providing the brightness of each pixel, the chip additionally provides the distance from each picture element to the sensor chip. In effect, this renders the scene into three dimensional objects that are easily processed even by the embedded processors in devices such as mobile phones and PDAs. "We call this 'primary 3-D data,' and it eliminates the need for massive calculations of one or more 2-D images to accomplish the same tasks," explains Canesta vice president Jim Spare.
The Electronic Perception Development Kit ("EP DevKit") includes a small USB-interfaced 3-D camera (based on an Equinox chip) along with an application programming interface (API) and documentation. The kit allows developers to prototype their application on a Windows PC, and later embed the same application -- along with an Equinox chip -- in an end-user device, similar to the way single chip CMOS cameras are integrated into cell phones today, the company says.
The kit provides access to raw frames of 3-D information via the USB interface. The API supports writing and debugging C or C++ applications using Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 on a Windows 2000 or Windows XP PC. Canesta says the API is common across Windows and embedded platform implementations, thereby enabling an application to be ported from the PC to a target embedded environment with minimal effort.
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