At the COMPUTEX conference in Taiwan Tuesday, Intel Corporation executives detailed progress toward the company’s vision to integrate human-like sensing technology into devices, ultimately delivering more natural, intuitive and immersive computing experiences.

To help realize this vision, Intel Capital, Intel’s Global Investment and M&A Organization, announced a $100-million investment fund over the next 2–3 years to accelerate the development of software and applications — touch applications, imaging, gesture, voice and emotion sensing and biometrics, among others — that bring these experiences to life across the spectrum of Intel architecture platforms.

.”Devices with human-like senses – the ability to see, hear and feel much like people do — has long been a subject of science fiction but is now within reach given recent innovations in compute power and camera technology,” said Arvind Sodhani, president of Intel Capital and Intel executive vice president. “This new fund will invest in start-ups and companies enabling these experiences, helping them with the business development support, global business network and technology expertise needed to scale for worldwide use.”

Progress in perceptual computing

Intel and its industry partners have also made significant progress in bringing the first perceptual computing technologies to the market for today’s Ultrabook systems and PCs, including:

• An interactive gesture camera from Creative, the Senz3D, which is already in the hands of developers and will be available to consumers in the third quarter of this year.
• Leading the development and enabling the integration of 3-D depth camera technology by working with multiple OEM partners to build the technology into various Intel-based devices with targeted availability for second half of 2014.
• Best Buy and Dell are distributing he Nuance Dragon Assistant or various computers.
• Facial log-in software from Sensible Vision will ship preloaded from multiple OEMs.

The Intel Capital Experiences and Perceptual Computing Fund will complement the existing Intel Capital Ultrabook Fund. Intel Capital has invested a significant portion of the $300-million Ultrabook Fund in innovative system component technologies in areas such as audio, touch, battery, display, sensor and wireless connectivity to make Intel-based computing devices thinner, lighter, more secure and responsive.

Senz3D

Also at the conference, Creative Technology Ltd announced its new Creative Senz3D interactive gesture camera for immersive multi-dimensional gaming, video conferencing and voice control.

Designed for use with 2nd generation and later Intel Core processors, Senz3D combines advanced depth sensor technology with a camera and dual array microphones to deliver a new multi-dimensional interactive experience. Users can play PC games using hand and finger gestures to control and interact with characters and environments. Its 3D sensing technology is able to enhance facial recognition and also extract a person’s image for various applications.

It will include software that enables interactive video conferencing, voice control of a PC, creation of video blog environments, and more.