Amazon has a strong interest in becoming the market leader in new technologies and doesn’t hesitate to go against big players like Google or Apple, especially in the AI market.
The company’s latest and greatest addition is the AWS DeepLens camera, aimed at developers and businesses.
While an average web camera—or any camera for that matter—captures objects as photographs or video, the newly announced AWS DeepLens, which is powered by Amazon Web Services, makes use of artificial intelligence to identify its subjects, making it easier to create an inventory, trigger an action or simply bring every other device under the IoT platform.
What’s the Buzz About AWS DeepLens?
In terms of hardware, AWS DeepLens video camera is definitely a powerful platform that is equipped with everything a developer would need. It has four HDMI ports for connecting displays, two USB ports, dual band WiFi settings, and the entire setup is powered by an Intel Atom processor with 8GB of RAM.
The AWS DeepLens camera has its own standalone operating system, Ubuntu, which is lightweight on hardware while still making it useful. Being a developer’s device, it can capture images and videos in 1080p resolution.
When combined with the powerful AI developed by Amazon, it enables the camera to identify several objects. In theory, a manufacturing plant can setup multiple cameras in their warehouse to scan products and add them to their inventory without deploying any humans on the job.
According to a blog post from AWS developers, the new video camera is capable of identifying different people, cats, dogs and objects. It can even identify hot dogs.
Amazon is aiming to achieve a world with less servers, and the AWS DeepLens product is already working towards making IoT in unison with AI to make use of the all the hardware that is available in the world today.
Helping Developers Build and Unify Ideas
AWS DeepLens is capable of identifying lots of things, but developers have the option to train the camera to identify specific objects and they can then upload that algorithm in a specific UI database created for the product.
The newly created projects and plug-in functionalities can be used by the specific developer, but will also be useful for others who may be looking for a specific usage scenario for the lens they buy.
Amazon has ensured that the pricing of the AWS DeepLens video camera falls in the affordable category, as it is priced at just $250 and directly competes with Google Clips.
However, the Google product is aimed towards customers whereas the new AWS DeepLens camera is purely for developers to make technological enhancements for their users.
They can connect multiple video cameras together to gather information and trigger automatic functions based on a person or an object in an industrial setup.
Similarly, AWS DeepLens will eventually be used in homes to provide access to a person to enter the house or to perform other actions when paired with their Alexa-powered Amazon Echo devices.