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cjdavies
Up and Coming
October 17, 2013

USB camera module with similar FOV to Rift?

I'm working on an application that aims to let you walk around a building with the Rift on, displaying the stream from a camera(s) on the front to allow you to safely navigate, then at any point fade the view from the camera into a virtual representation of your surroundings.

At the moment I have a PlayStation Eye webcam zip tied to the top of the Rift, however the FOV of the Eye is only 75° (according to Wikipedia, I assume this is the diagonal FOV). I realise that the FOV that the users 'sees' through the Rift depends on the eye cups (A, B or C) & how close/far they have them adjusted from their eyes, but consensus seems to be that the diagonal FOV is minimum 90° & maximum 110° diagonal so I want to replace the PS Eye camera with one (or two?) that are within this 90-110° range.

I think what I want is something like the modules on this page;

http://www.electronics123.com/s.nl/it.A/id.3263/.f

They have 1/4" VGA sensors & a choice of lenses; 2.2mm seems to be the shortest focal length & produces 109° diagonal FOV, 2.5mm provides 100° diagonal, etc.

Does anybody have any experience with these sort of modules & can recommend models &/or stockists? I have come across plenty of examples of people attaching webcams (or the innards of webcams) to their Rift, but no proper discussion of matching focal lengths to get a similar FOV when viewing the real world as the virtual.

    19 replies

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    cjdaviesAuthor
    Up and Coming
    October 31, 2013
    It looks like this guy has already written code that uses the CL Eye Platform SDK to get multiple PS Eye cameras working in Unity. Unfortunately it's all in Japanese, but code is code so hopefully I can get it working without too much issue.

    http://d.hatena.ne.jp/hecomi/20130731/1375279561

    I'm also going to 3D print this clip/mount from USC;

    http://projects.ict.usc.edu/mxr/diy/oculus-sensor-mount/



    And I've designed a piece to attach to it that will allow me to mount both of the cameras & adjust their position/interpupilary distance (or just have one in the centre if one is better);

    JohnF30
    Participant
    November 1, 2013
    you can buy the Playstation Camera ( for the PS4). It has two 1280 x 800 (sounds familiar) cameras with a wider FOV than the PS eye. That camera is available right now.
    cjdaviesAuthor
    Up and Coming
    November 1, 2013
    Well I already had a pair of the PlayStation 3 version & there are fairly well established drivers & community experience with them so I don't think I would really gain much from the PlayStation 4 version. I think the 640x480 resolution of the older ones will be sufficient for my experiments at least to begin with, although higher res to match the vertical resolution of the Rift would probably look a bit nicer in the end.
    cjdaviesAuthor
    Up and Coming
    November 4, 2013
    A bit of progress, got one part of the mount printed off. Turns out the MakerBot Replicator 2X I have access to is rather temperamental (took 4x attempts to get this far) so I haven't printed the second part yet.

    cjdaviesAuthor
    Up and Coming
    November 6, 2013
    Some fun progress to report! I got the second part of the camera mount printed & epoxy'd to the clip & I found a Japanese blogger who has written a Unity package that uses the PS Eye SDK to support 2x PS Eye webcams in Unity. I've had to downgrade to Unity 4.1.5f1 in order for it to succesfully load the camera dll & you seem to have to install the dev binaries when installing the camera SDK rather than the redistributable binaries.

    http://d.hatena.ne.jp/hecomi/20130731/1375279561

    Cable ties are temporary, I need to order some nuts/bolts/washers to properly mount the camers into the channels which will then let me change the interpupilary distance or move one into the centre & disable the other. One of them has to be upside down in order for the lense to get close enough to each other (the wider part of the PCB is too wide to have them side-by-side both the same way up).

    cybereality
    Inspiring
    November 7, 2013
    Looking good.
    AMD Ryzen 7 1800X | MSI X370 Titanium | G.Skill 16GB DDR4 3200 | EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 | Corsair Hydro H110i Gigabyte RX Vega 64 x2 | Samsung 960 Evo M.2 500GB | Seagate FireCuda SSHD 2TB | Phanteks ENTHOO EVOLV
    mediavr
    Up and Coming
    November 8, 2013
    Mobius cameras have a USB webcam mode. If you buy the wider lens version they are close to Rift requirements when used vertically. You can save (or stream) 720p stereo videos at 30fps without frame dropping on a fast drive (using Stereoscopic Multiplexer say) http://joovuu.com/home/82-mobius-standard-lens-bicycle-pack.html
    Mobius are very popular as a Gopro alternative with the Radio Control crowd
    http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1904559
    With extra wide (Sunex) lenses you can get lookaround videos for the Rift in VR Player. Like these of mine
    http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/1on60b/a_high_resolution_180_degree_stereoscopic_music/
    cjdaviesAuthor
    Up and Coming
    November 12, 2013
    Really promising progress today, all of the metal spacers/washers/bolts arrived so I've gotten the cameras mounted properly. I had to add extra washers to one camera because the 3D printer obviously didn't print the plate perfectly flat. First impression from wearing it is that the view is far too zoomed in, but I think that's simply because I'm just using somebody else's code that was written for these cameras with their stock lenses so I will have to modify the code somewhere to take into account the much wider lenses.









    Reallyrad
    New Participant
    November 26, 2013
    We are working on related issues with http://themachinetobeanother.org. Recently http://willsteptoe.com uploaded a very impressive demo of his Rift AR system, along with blog posts on how to achieve proper FOV for the oculus rift.
    From our experiments, the experience is ok when using 1.7mm FOV lenses with one PS3 eye camera video streaming to the oculus rift. Without applying the barrel distortion shader, this particular lens FOV seems to compensate a bit the oculus rift's lenses distortion. We are trying to make a 3D camera with 2 PS3eye cameras based on William Steptoe's tutorials, although he recomends using logitech C310 cameras for their superior resolution.
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