Check-In CES: Mapping Your World Countless Applications Could Take Advantage Of A 3D World

Occipital is an extremely clever product which mounts onto the camera of an iPad to map the environment in 3D. There are countless applications for a mobile device which can sense the world in three dimensions. Homeowners can use it to quickly model a room with precise dimensions and experiment with different furniture arrangements. Game developers can use it to place virtual objects which interact with real-world environments. All of this is made possible because Occipital is participating in a trend of open source hardware which is changing the way that startups operate. They focus on creating a stable piece of hardware and rely on the development community to extract its full potential for practical application.

To understand the full impact of open source hardware on consumer electronics, think back to CES 2012. That was the first time that developers had a full year to experiment with Microsoft’s Kinect hardware, and its presence was felt throughout the show. Kinect as a gaming device was fun and exciting, but Kinect as a platform for technology development was revolutionary. [...]