Opal Camera, Inc. has entered the invite-only beta phase for their Opal C1 ~ what they call "the first professional webcam."
The camera itself is designed for the professionals who have admirably joined Zoom meeting after Teams meeting after Zoom meeting, enduring sometimes-unintelligible audio and frozen video frames, to continue to work in a world disrupted by a global pandemic.
HWI has collaborated with engineers from Opal to include machine learning capability for not only audio (intelligent noise cancellation, a feature which is becoming standard) but for video as well. The system includes a PCB designed by HWI to interface with cutting-edge AI/CV (Artificial Intelligence/Computer Vision) hardware. HWI also developed firmware for the module, and we were very proud to see our satisfied customer using their own product in a web conference with our team of engineers.
As one technical observer remarked, "the C1 fills an unoccupied need in the market." At the low end of cameras are fragile and buggy webcams that we have all struggled with, and at the high end, equipment is expensive, have technical barriers, or both (for example, using a DSLR camera as a webcam).
Others such as Alexis Ohanian, Reddit co-founder and husband of tennis player Serena Williams, have also expressed praise for the camera.
HWI is thankful and proud to have helped develop a solution for people to see and hear their colleagues with much more fidelity, and to have helped enable digital collaboration in an environment of increasingly globally distributed teams.
#GoFarTogether ~by Huan Nguyen