Future of Orbbec Astra development

Having just purchased an Orbbec Astra for development testing - I have become concerned that development of the SDK seems noticeably stalled.

As a hardware product the Astra Pro appears to have a lot of potential for our application needs - BUT the SDK seems to be stuck at sometime last year - are there any actual published timelines or roadmaps to give some guidance on where this is likely to go.

The other area of concern is the push to Geestos for gesture tracking - is this at the expense of any further work on the gesture system in the native SDK? This itself is of considerable concern given that the Geestos SDK itself seems stuck in the past - with only VS2013 support available - meaning its not compatible with many of the other tools we currently use.

Would appreciate any thoughts and comments to assist in best further evaluating the suitability of the Astra camera systems for our needs.

Specifically we are most interested in responsive and accurate gesture tracking

Cheers

Wes Tatters
westa

Hi Wes,

We asked the same question almost a year ago and again half a year ago.
Unfortunately we didn’t receive answer.
The hardware is very good and they seem to be developing this actively, unfortunately the software side is lacking any support.
Development on their SDK seem to have stalled around october 2015 and there has been very little communication about a roadmap or future about their software support (besides general ‘this will be available somewhere in the future’).

We contacted them in June this year when they announced the 3-party support for skeletal tracking from 3DiVi if this was all the skeleton tracking support we were going to get and we got an response that they were still working on their own support as well.
But this was over two months ago and nothing official has been announced since then.

So I’m afraid I don’t really have an answer for you regarding sustainability. They say they are still working on SDK support but it has been almost two years since anything significant has been released.

Our own guess is that they are trying to become a hardware vendor and leave the software support to third party suppliers. But that’s just our guess from the interaction we’ve had this year and isn’t based on official statements or press releases.

Regards
Peter