Hands-on: Intel’s RealSense cameras can easily plug your image into a Twitch livestream

Game livestreamers are going to love this.

With the Intel RealSense camera for the PC, it’s going to be really easily to automatically capture video of your face and insert it into a Twitch livestream of a game in real-time. As Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich demonstrated today at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, the Intel RealSense-powered cameras provide motion-sensing, gesture recognition, and 3D scanning.

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Intel showed a demo of a Twitch livestream of Rocket League running on a PC. I walked up to the display with a Razer camera that uses the RealSense technology. The camera instantly recognized me and captured my face in a video stream. Then it cut out the background and inserted the video of my face into the lower right corner of the screen displaying the excellent vehicle-soccer game. So it was effortless.

Normally, it takes a little know-how to clip your image from a video stream and then patch it into a livestream. Changing backgrounds can be a hassle, requiring the use of a green screen. But the RealSense camera captures imagery in 3D, so it can easily tell an object that is in the foreground and objects that are in the background. Now it can change the background on the fly.

The two leading streaming solutions for Twitch streamers — XSplit Gamecaster and OBS multiplatform, will feature Intel RealSense technology directly from their apps. XSplit Gamecaster with native integration of the technology will be available by the end of this year.

The technology could make it easier for people to become Twitch broadcasters. Twitch has more than 100 million viewers a month, but a small percentage of them are broadcasters. Intel will further show off the technology as the lead sponsor for the TwitchCon 2015 event in San Francisco in September.