Raspberry Pi camera module - Could it be modded for Oculus?

"edzieba" wrote:

"Harley" wrote:
I guess you would still require a separate microcontroller with digital camera interface for USB connection to your PC (without connecting a full Raspberry Pi to use it as the micro controller)

Why NOT use the Pi? It can stream the video over a network connection to the PC.

Because of latency, which is very important for Augmented Reality. That is unless you connect your Oculus Rift directly to the Raspberry Pi via HDMI of course, which would probably work fine for simple Augmented Reality and be good mobile prototyping, but would not work for more advanced Augmented Reality application and games, and absolutely not be capable of Augmented Reality on-top of high resolution and high frame rate game play.

I just can't imagine that using a Raspberry Pi as the microcontroller to capture the video data and sending it as a stream over the network would have lower latency than using a USB attached microcrontroller for the camera to connect it directly to the PC which in turn have the Oculus Rift connected to it via HDMI / DVI.

"edzieba" wrote:
Of course, the module is currently firmware limited to 30fps. The foundation is working on getting 720p60 and 640x480 90fps working, but the driver is closed-source so can only be worked on internally to Broadcom.

Broadcom is known to be one of the more open source friendly companies out there, and they have previously released many drivers, firmwares, and libraries under open source libraries.

I am sure that with enough 'pestering' from the Raspberry Pi community they could be convinced to release all code for these camera modules too.