Razer is never short of ideas to push the PC gaming experience ahead. After successfully entering classic markets such as mice, keyboards, wearables and even laptops, webcams are the next target for Razer, and this is where the RAZER Stargazer webcam comes in.
It’s fair to say that webcams were long dominated by a single player, namely Logitech, and this is a category of hardware that has not had important evolutions for years, even though camera technology has progressed significantly, thanks to smartphones. This vacuum is exactly what RAZER wants to bank on.
The Stargazer webcam is designed to cater to the needs of gamers. For this reason, it can stream at 60 FPS (frames per second), although in 720p. The main reason it’s not streaming in 1080p is the bandwidth requirements, but you can bet that it’ll come in time. Of course, it’s possible to stream in 1080p 30FPS as well.
Stargazer has a secondary microphone to provide audio noise-cancellation to make conversations as clear as possible.
Now it becomes really interesting when you see that Razer has integrated the Intel RealSense 3D scanning technology. If you are unfamiliar with, it is similar to Microsoft’s Kinect because it uses an infrared “depth” sensor that gives it the ability to see accurately how far things are from the camera.
With this, it’s possible not do things like virtual “blue screens” which is great because having a physical one is often not practical for the vast majority of users. It works by “clipping” out everything that farther than the back of the user, and at the same time, using classic detouring algorithms, aided by depth sensing.
Secondly, the 3D scanning technology can truly scan real-world objects into 3d Models, at the moment directly into Unity. I don’t think that I would use to describe the models as production-ready for games, but it could certainly help with 3D-printing projects if you need to have a reference model. It can also scan stuff to Minecraft, and that could save you thousands of clicks.
These features are powerful, and so is the price of the Stargazer Webcam: at $199, it will be one of the most expensive ones, but that seems to be the price of progress.
Filed in . Read more about CES, CES 2016, Razer and Webcams.