Intel's Kinect competitor comes to market in new HP desktops

Hardware manufacturer HP has brought an interesting PC to market this week: it's called Sprout, a 23-inch touchscreen Windows 8 desktop a with touch-sensitive desk mat that can purportedly serve as a second screen. What makes this possible -- and potentially interesting to game developers -- is the Sprout's "Illuminator" 4-camera capture and projection system, which includes an Intel RealSense 3D camera. Intel has already funded development of games that might work well with RealSense and sponsored talks at game developer conferences in an effort to coax developers into making games that utilize its RealSense technology. Intel has long claimed that RealSense affords developers the option to do sophisticated voice recognition, motion capture and facial recognition at a level beyond that of contemporary sensors like Microsoft's Kinect 2.0 or the Leap Motion. HP's Sprout is one of the first devices with a RealSense camera to actually come to market, and it will be interesting to see which developers, if any, will embrace the platform.