Microsoft launches its first AI-powered smart web camera

Surface Hub 2 Web Cam

Microsoft is introducing its first AI-powered smart web camera. For now, it is designed for the Surface Hub 2S. From its Work Trend Index study, the Software giant is unveiling its first AI-powered smart web camera, starting at $799.99.

The Microsoft Surface Hub 2 Smart Camera is not just an everyday webcam, it comes with some highly impressive features and capabilities. This camera has a 1-teraflop of computing for automatic re-framing and smart image correction features. According to Microsoft, this Smart Camera is to be the best professional-grade AI-powered web camera in the market.

The Surface Hub 2 comes with a 12 MP camera that supports up to 136 degrees field view. It is able to focus on both new and as far as up to 8 meters objects. The camera is also capable of focusing on multiple areas and automatically identifying a speaker in a room at the same time. It captures videos in a 16:9 aspect ratio with a peak 1440p resolution.

The AI-powered smart web camera can improve wide-angle corrections and distortions. It’s able to detect objects in different lighting conditions and different postures. In a conference room, mostly a common web camera captures mainly a single person, but this smart web camera can pick multiple persons with the same high-quality wide-angle focus. With this feature, it can be ensured that all participants in a conference room can be visible and heard properly, and enhanced low light performance. This smart webcam has auto-adjusted parameters such as exposure levels and white balance and minimizes flickering.

The Surface Hub 2 designed with an aluminum enclosure relies on a magnetic placement system, pairing with a USB type C port. There is a white LED indicator to show the activity status. The smart camera equipped with Intel's Myriad X 2085 ISP, and an 18-core processor with a raw compute power of 1 TFLOPS, comes with 1GB of RAM, 8GB of onboard storage.

Steven Bathiche, corporate vice president of Windows and Devices, said that,

"Surface Hub 2 Smart Camera re-frames, adjusts lighting, and enables incredibly wide angles of view, all without any warping, distortions, or depth-of-field issues that might otherwise limit what is visible. The team put tremendous work into tuning the experience to capture and frame what is occurring in the room while being smooth and natural for remote viewers or participants."

 

Bathiche said,

"We designed Surface Hub to be upgradable, modular, and flexible to change with the times and technology. These updates to both hardware and software demonstrate the ongoing benefits available to our Surface Hub 2S customers, and we hope they help to draw teams a little bit closer."

 

Bathiche also added,

"The Surface team has been on a mission to bring people together, whether they are in the same room or worlds apart."

Microsoft sets the price to shell an AI-powered Surface Hub 2 smart web camera out at $800 for its high-end web camera.

According to the reports, some other features that Microsoft still works to incorporate like virtually presenting a PowerPoint, and solving some common webcam issues such as warping, or shallow depth of field during video calls.









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