The world of intelligent and interactive systems is undergoing an era of unprecedented innovation and advanced development. With the rapid progress in natural sensing and perceptual computing technologies, devices and machines are increasingly being endowed with the abilities to sense and understand the world, navigate in the environment, and interact with humans in natural ways. Interfaces based on touch sensing and speech recognition are now ubiquitous, and the race is on to the next frontiers of machine intelligence and interactions based on three-dimensional (3D) sensing. In this paper, we review the recent progress in the development of real-time 3D-sensing technologies and their deployment in a new class of interactive and autonomous systems. As an example of a commercially available platform, we describe the Intel® RealSense technologies, as well as its deployments in a new class of interactive and autonomous systems and applications.
