David Smith: Eric Fossum lectures Yale students on next-gen range sensors, 3D content shortages

Ready for Kinect-like depth sensing magic in your pocket? It might be on the way, according to Eric Fossum, the man behind the CMOS sensor. During an Engineering lecture at Yale, Fossum let it slip that he was working on a new time-of-flight range sensor with Samsung, and said "we're trying to catch up to a lot of people." Pulling up a slide, Fossom described a 2-megapixel color sensor with a time-of-flight sensor inserted inside. "This doesn't even get announced until February," he said. Mentioning Sammy's place in the 3D TV game, Fossum said that there wasn't enough 3D content available to make 3D sets viable, "We have to enable people to be able to make 3D content before we can sell a lot of 3D TVs." Between his lecture slides and befuddling words, Fossum suggested that cell phones equipped with 3D color image sensors could fill this content gap, calling it a "vision." Hold tight to that word, though -- Fossum wasn't exactly crystal clear on what Sammy's going to do with this technology, or what it's going to announce in February. What do we know for sure? We need more 3D programming. Well, that and Samsung is going to announce something next year. Hit the break to hear the man in his own words. You can even pretend you're a Yale student, we won't judge.

Update: Fossum dropped by to give us a statement. "The RGBZ sensor represents the state of the art in research and development," he says, "Technical information about this R&D advancement will be reported in February."

[Thanks, Salem]

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Eric Fossum lectures Yale students on next-gen range sensors, 3D content shortages originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 31 Oct 2011 07:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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