The newly unveiled Surface Neo isn’t the company’s only dual-screen device. The company has also announced a Surface phone called ‘Surface Duo’ that runs Google’s Android apps and supports Microsoft’s services straight from the Play Store.
Surface Duo is designed by Panos Panay led Surface team and it appears to feature great hardware, but previous rumors claimed that the Surface Duo device will feature a mid-core camera.
The Surface Duo, which competes against the Galaxy Fold and Mate X, may not come with a great camera module, but the Redmond firm appears to be working on major software-related improvements.
In addition to software-based improvements, Microsoft is also working on depth camera resource management. Microsoft says that it plans to use three-dimensional ‘3D’ cameras to offer enhanced performance compared to standard cameras. For instance, 2D cameras rely on sensing motion in a scene to trigger activation, which can be addressed with 3D cameras.
“3D imaging can rectify many of the shortcomings of 2D images. However, traditional operating techniques for depth cameras tend to use a relatively large amount of resources,” Microsoft noted in a
patent filing.
Microsoft says that the depth cameras can also be capable of generating different types of frames, such as 2D frames, 3D frames, and/or frames of relatively higher and lower resolution and/or frames of different fields of view, among others.
The company is exploring various types of depth cameras such as time-of-flight depth cameras, structured light depth cameras, and/or stereo depth cameras.
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