I'm writing to make you aware of an exciting new Kickstarter project, the "LazeeEye": http://kck.st/1gVCcrB

LazeeEye takes your existing smartphone and turns it into a depth camera using laser illuminator hardware and a stereo vision processing app.

The goal is to produce hardware and software that can bring 3D perception to devices that have low-power/low-weight processing and a high-resolution, such as what you would find in your smartphone.

You as a ROS user can be particularly excited about using your existing smartphone in robotics applications. In fact, the inspiration for the LazeeEye was for lightweight aerial robots, where we were constrained by the redundancy, inefficiency, cost, and lack of portability of existing 3D sensors.

For more information, or to consider supporting the project, please check out the Kickstarter page: http://kck.st/1gVCcrB, and don't hesitate to spread the word!

I just wanted to affirm that ROS drivers will be made available for LazeeEye, including image capture through rosjava (if on Android). We'll make every attempt possible to match existing conventions for the RGB-D processing pipeline, so as to seamlessly replace your legacy Kinects and Xtions : )

Also wanted to mention hardware support for LazeePi (LazeeEye on a Raspberry Pi), and its camera module.