Intel's aspirations to evolve the means by which we interact with computers beyond the conventional keyboard, mouse and trackpad, specifically extending the "vision" (pun intended) to capabilities such as gestures, gaze tracking and face recognition, are well documented at this point. The company publicly demonstrated its aspirations at the January 2012 Consumer Electronics Show, for example (and repeated the showcase a year later, in a more mature form), followed by a more formal rollout of the Perceptual Computing SDK (and announced partnership with Alliance member company SoftKinetic) at that September's Intel Developer Forum. That same June, SoftKinetic had released a time-of-flight technology-based camera reference design, which it and Intel subsequently revealed would be productized by Creative Labs.
This past June, Intel and SoftKinetic further formalized their relationship; the former company announced that it was licensing the latter's middleware for close-range gesture tracking, to be included in the Perceptual Computing SDK. And one month later, Intel acquired another gesture interface pioneer, former Alliance member Omek Interactive. Back to that Creative camera, though…today, as noted at GigaOM, the company formally named it (the Senz3D), priced it ($210), and put it up for pre-order (for consumers…it's actually been available to developers since last November). As another GigaOM writeup from last week pointed out, Intel's eventual aspirations extend beyond the previously mentioned camera uses to the kinds of computer user-emotion discernment that MIT Professor Rosalind Picard discussed in her Embedded Vision Summit keynote a year ago.
