Acer's Aspire V 17 Nitro gaming laptop features Intel's RealSense 3D camera, supports Kinect-like gestures
Chloe Albanesius / PC Magazine :
Context & Ripple Effects
At CES 2015, Acer is making depth sensing the differentiator on its Nitro gaming line, shipping Intel's RealSense 3D camera inside the Aspire V 17 Nitro to enable Kinect-style gestures — an early attempt to give laptops an input layer beyond mouse and keyboard.
The move kicked off a longer sensor arc at both companies: by that August Razer was planning to pull RealSense out of the laptop and into an external Kinect-style camera for game streaming and VR, and years later Acer itself returned to sensing-based 3D with the eye-tracked, glasses-free ConceptD 7 SpatialLabs display.
First-order effects
- Intel gains a flagship consumer showcase for RealSense, with Acer's gaming laptop serving as proof that depth cameras can ship in mainstream Windows hardware rather than lab demos.
Second-order effects
- Razer's follow-on plan to build RealSense into an external Kinect-style camera for streaming and VR turns Acer's built-in sensor into a platform other peripheral makers can extend, pressuring rivals like Dell's Alienware line — which was still competing mostly on CPU refreshes — to answer with their own input innovations.
Third-order effects
- If gesture control proves thin but sensing sticks, the durable payoff is exactly what Acer later shipped: camera arrays repurposed from gesture input to eye tracking driving glasses-free 3D displays, making embedded depth hardware a long-lived differentiator for premium laptop pricing.
The trend: PC makers are embedding depth and eye-tracking sensors to differentiate commoditizing gaming laptops, with the use case migrating from gesture control toward glasses-free 3D displays.