Orbbec

Orbbec
Information
Type	Public
Industry	3D vision, depth cameras, robot vision
Founded	18 January 2013
Founder	Howard Huang (Huang Yuanhao)
Headquarters	Shenzhen, China
Notable Personnel	Howard Huang (founder, chairman and CEO), David Chen (co-founder and head of products)
Products	Astra, Gemini and Femto depth cameras, Pulsar lidar, EGO data collection modules
Website	https://www.orbbec.com

Orbbec (Orbbec Inc.; Chinese: 奥比中光科技集团股份有限公司) is a Chinese maker of 3D vision sensors, including structured-light, stereo and time-of-flight depth cameras and lidar. It was established in Shenzhen in January 2013 by Howard Huang (Huang Yuanhao), and its shares have traded on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's STAR Market under the code 688322 since 7 July 2022. Forbes reported that in the first half of 2025 almost two-thirds of its sales came from biometric sensors, chiefly for facial recognition, and about a third from sensors for robots.

Orbbec's Femto cameras are built on the indirect time-of-flight depth technology that Microsoft first brought to market in the HoloLens 2. When Microsoft announced in August 2023 that it would end production of the Azure Kinect DK, it pointed customers to Orbbec, whose cameras use the same depth camera module, and named the Femto Bolt as a partner option. Orbbec lists volumetric video for AR and XR among the Femto Bolt's uses, and VR and AR studios have used the camera for volumetric capture (see XR work).

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Founding, listing and Hong Kong filing details, financial table, Microsoft/Azure Kinect relationship, product family specs and XR case studies checked against the cited filings, Orbbec pages, Forbes, Jiemian, 36Kr, TechCrunch and The Robot Report. About review dates.

History

Founding and first products

Huang studied engineering at Peking University, the National University of Singapore and City University of Hong Kong, and worked as a research fellow at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology and Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Forbes reported that he had worked on 3D optical measurement since 2002 and started Orbbec in 2013 with 10 million yuan borrowed from four high school friends. The company was registered as a limited company on 18 January 2013 and became a joint-stock company on 27 October 2020.

Orbbec's first camera family was the Astra series, which uses structured light with a depth-processing ASIC designed by Orbbec. Mass production began at the end of 2015. In October 2015 the company ran an Indiegogo campaign for Persee, a small computer running Android or Ubuntu with a built-in Astra Pro camera. CNX Software reported on 4 October that it had already raised about US$45,000 against a US$40,000 goal; pledges started at US$99 for an Astra camera and US$179 for Persee.

Biometrics and the STAR Market listing

According to Forbes, Orbbec's first device, launched in 2015, was for 3D scanning, and sensors for biometrics followed two years later. Ant Group's Alipay uses its cameras for facial recognition in contactless payments, and the smartphone maker Oppo also became a customer for facial recognition sensors. According to Jiemian, Orbbec custom-built the front structured-light 3D sensor for Oppo's Find X series, with output on the order of a million units. Ant Group was its largest customer in 2021 and accounted for 26.64% of revenue that year.

Orbbec listed on the STAR Market on 7 July 2022 at an issue price of 30.99 yuan per share, raising more than 1.2 billion yuan. Chinese media called it the "first 3D vision stock". The company had not yet made a profit: it reported net losses in each year from 2019 to 2021.

Microsoft partnership and Femto cameras

Microsoft said the two companies had worked together "since 2021" to bring more cameras based on its indirect time-of-flight (iToF) technology to market. Orbbec announced the Femto Mega in January 2023 and launched the Femto Bolt in August 2023, by which time the ruggedized Femto Mega I was also shipping. In its August 2023 announcement that it would stop making the Azure Kinect DK, Microsoft wrote: "This week, Orbbec launched the Femto Bolt." It described the camera as "a partner option that customers who are interested in a solution like Azure Kinect Developer Kit can consider." At NVIDIA GTC in March 2024, Orbbec stated that it had "been officially endorsed to carry forward the Microsoft Azure Kinect DK product lineage."

Robotics growth and Hong Kong filing

Orbbec has since expanded its robot vision range. It added the Gemini 435Le stereo camera at Automate 2025 and the Pulsar ME450 multi-pattern lidar at the World Robot Conference 2025 in Beijing. Its customers include service robot makers such as Pudu Robotics and Gausium and humanoid robot makers such as AgiBot, UBTech Robotics and X-Humanoid. Orbbec claims 70% of the market for 3D vision sensors in mobile service robots in China and South Korea by units sold. Forbes reported that Huang's 27% stake made him a billionaire in 2025.

The company reported a net profit for 2025 after years of losses. On 24 September 2026 it applied to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange to list H shares on its Main Board. According to 36Kr's summary of the filing, Orbbec had 1,098 employees, 509 of them in research and development, and Ant Group's venture capital arm held about 8.92% of the shares.

Period	Revenue (yuan)	Net result (yuan)
2019	597 million	Loss of 501 million
2020	259 million	Loss of 627 million
2021	474 million	Loss of 336 million
2023	360 million	Loss of 276 million
2024	564 million	Loss of 62.89 million
2025	941 million	Profit of 128 million
First half of 2026	438 million	Profit of 40.79 million

Products

Orbbec sells cameras under several family names, grouped by depth-sensing method. Its open-source Orbbec SDK supports the current Gemini and Femto models.

Family	Depth method	Notable models	Notes
Astra	Structured light	Astra, Astra S, Astra Pro Plus	First Orbbec camera family; depth up to 640x480 at 30 fps; range 0.6-8 m (0.4-2 m for Astra S); USB 2.0
Persee	Structured light	Persee	Small computer with a built-in Astra Pro camera, crowdfunded on Indiegogo in 2015
Femto	Indirect time-of-flight (Microsoft)	Femto Mega, Femto Mega I, Femto Bolt	1-megapixel depth sensor with a 120-degree field of view, 4K RGB camera and 6DoF IMU; Femto Mega has a built-in NVIDIA Jetson Nano and Power over Ethernet; Femto Mega I is rated IP65
Gemini	Stereo vision	Gemini 2, Gemini 330 series, Gemini 435Le	Gemini 435Le is an IP67-rated stereo camera for robot navigation and industrial uses such as pallet dimensioning, shown at Automate 2025
Pulsar	Lidar	Pulsar ME450, Pulsar SL450	ME450 is a direct time-of-flight lidar that combines a MEMS mirror with a motor and switches between scan patterns
EGO	Egocentric (first-person) cameras	RGB EGO, RGB-D EGO, Dual-Ego	Egocentric vision modules for collecting first-person training data for robots; the Dual-Ego prototype shown in August 2026 has two 2-megapixel fisheye cameras, a six-axis IMU running at up to 1,000 Hz and a weight of 200 g

The Femto Bolt is the model most often used in XR production. Orbbec lists depth output of up to 1024x1024 at 15 fps in wide field-of-view mode or 640x576 at 30 fps in narrow mode, a depth range of 0.25-5.46 m depending on mode, color video up to 3840x2160 at 30 fps, a USB-C connection for power and data, and a weight of 348 g. Compared with the Azure Kinect DK, it is more compact, adds HDR to the color camera and a trigger system for linking several cameras, and drops the microphone array. Orbbec publishes a wrapper for the Azure Kinect Sensor SDK, so software written for the Azure Kinect, including Microsoft's Body Tracking SDK, can run on Femto cameras.

XR work

Orbbec's main link to virtual and augmented reality is volumetric capture, where a ring of RGB-D cameras records a person as a moving 3D model. The Depthkit volumetric video software added support for the Femto Bolt, and on 18 December 2023 its developers began shipping Depthkit Studio hardware packages built on the camera. They said the ten-camera package could now capture at 1440p, up from the previous 1080p limit. ScannedReality, a Munich company that makes software for recording spatial video for playback in VR and AR, moved from the Azure Kinect to Femto Bolt cameras and uses ten of them synchronized in one setup, according to an Orbbec case study. Orbbec itself lists volumetric video "for use in AR/XR" among the Femto Bolt's media uses.

Earlier Orbbec cameras were used for full-body tracking. In May 2017 Orbbec released skeletal tracking for its sensors, implemented by 3DiVi. The XR blog The Ghost Howls discussed it as a lower-cost route to markerless full-body tracking in VR and reported that 3DiVi's VicoVR body tracker used a custom sensor based on an Orbbec depth sensor. Projection-based AR also uses the cameras. AR-Sandbox.eu builds augmented reality sandboxes that project contour lines and hydrology simulations onto real sand for classrooms, museums and science centers. After shipping Kinect v2-based sandboxes and then trying the Azure Kinect, it rebuilt its system around the Femto Bolt, according to an Orbbec case study.

Orbbec also supplies 3D scanning hardware. In an April 2025 filing for a private share placement, it listed Matterport and Realsee among its customers. The same filing named the metaverse and digital twins among the main industries that a planned robot and AI vision project, which includes high-precision 3D scanning research, would serve. Its EGO modules, shown in 2026, capture first-person (egocentric) video and motion data, but Orbbec markets them for collecting robot training data rather than for XR.

See also

• Azure Kinect DK
• Microsoft Kinect
• Intel RealSense
• PrimeSense
• Depth sensing
• Volumetric capture