Intel's Latest Acquisition Is All About Giving Sight to Machines

Intel intc is to buy the Irish chip firm Movidius to boost its ambitions of giving "human-like sight" to connected devices. Movidius makes system-on-a-chip (SoC) platforms that are designed to aid computer vision applications, and also has algorithms for things like deep learning, navigation and depth processing. The idea is to be able to do on a mobile device the kind of heavy image interpretation that currently requires remote processing power somewhere off in the cloud. This should allow for quicker reactions and ultimately more autonomous machines. Movidius's technology will be integrated with Intel's RealSense depth-sensing camera tech, which is already found in a few webcams out there and is also being built into augmented reality headsets and drones.