Sample Cameras for MoCap Experiments Came In

My sample cameras came in. I ordered two cheap webcams, a Sony PlayStation 3 Eye Camera and a Fosmon USB 6 LED 1.2 Megapixel USB PC Webcam as these were both under ten dollars and looked potentially interesting.

The Fosmon camera looks too slow and low on image quality to be useful for my purposes here so I’m shelving that one. The PS3 eye camera is challenging to interface to a PC, but at $6.00 per camera, I’m inclined to spend some effort here. There do appear to be Linux drivers out there and I’m going to look at a RPi mediated option with these (I’m willing to invest $30.00 for five more cameras to give this a try).

The other option that was presented as viable are Logitech C922x Pro Stream Webcams. I have two Logitech C930e cameras currently…these won’t run 60 FPS but have comparable image quality and a wider field of view. At $70.00 each, I won’t be picking up six c922x cameras any time soon, but I may purchase on or two if all goes well to see what they are capable of. They’re almost certainly better cameras than the PS3 Eye devices, but rather pricey.

I’m also picking up some CR2023 batteries and battery holders along with a box of LEDs and some 19mm ‘ping pong balls’ to try as diffusers.

This is all an experiment, so it may come to nothing more than an interesting diversion. The commercial motion capture options are far too expensive to be viable as a hobby thing and I’m expecting to have some fun putting this together and seeing where it can go.

I would be particularly happy to see an RPi solution work out as having one pi board for each pair of cameras (or even for each camera at a stretch) with an Ethernet back-haul to a full fledged PC for processing would be a flexible and relatively affordable solution with pretty good scalability to more cameras as well.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *