Peephole display, or scrolling with the webcam?
 

This was on slashdot a long time ago:
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~ping/peep/
I think the n800's webcam would substitute nicely for the optical mouse used in one of the setups. It also appears that the clie used has a camera, but glancing over the paper it did not appear to be used as a tracking device.

Is any work being done on this? I know some people have the right idea :)
http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...6566#post26566

I found https://garage.maemo.org/projects/motiondetector/ but this does not appear to do any scrolling or panning.

Re: Peephole display, or scrolling with the webcam?
 

I can see great potential if this comes to fruition.

Since the web cam is rotatable, it can function as a jog dial and we can scroll simply by rotating it.

While this may seem like over kill, it'll be a nifty goldberg jog dial.

Re: Peephole display, or scrolling with the webcam?
 

Why rotate the camera? Write a proggie that can follow a fingertip, so all you have to do is wave your finger over the camera to make the screen go where you want. Sort of a virtual scrollpad.

Simple, huh? :p

Re: Peephole display, or scrolling with the webcam?
 

Seems like no one is gettin excited about this.. :confused:

Re: Peephole display, or scrolling with the webcam?
 

Maybe it's not that simple after all... :rolleyes:

Re: Peephole display, or scrolling with the webcam?
 

re: this, bear in mind that just getting the video stream burns quite a bit of resources. Real-time image analysis is A) voodoo and B) processor-expensive :)

That said, aiming it at a presentation and looking for a laser pointer dot (rather cheap, processor-wise) as a control signal? Could be nifty.

Re: Peephole display, or scrolling with the webcam?
 

Oh, emulating an optical mouse is rather tricky, given that the sample rates of those dramatically exceed (3x-100x) that of the N800's camera.

Re: Peephole display, or scrolling with the webcam?
 

I wasn't thinking about full mouse emulation, rather than simple scrolling, a bit like what a center mouse wheel does.

Re: Peephole display, or scrolling with the webcam?
 

That's what I mean by emulating an optical mouse.

An optical mouse takes a rapidfire series of pictures and compares sets of them to determine which way you moved it (this is why fast movements on patterned surfaces can throw it off something fierce.)

Your average optical mouse samples at 60hz and 400dpi; more advanced mice (laser mice, generally) sample at 125hz and 800dpi; gaming mice sample at 500hz and 1600dpi; my mouse samples at 1000hz and 2000dpi :)

Optical mice also take pictures at a constant height, etc, etc.

This isn't -impossible- to duplicate, but it is quite hard. I intend to poke at it.

Re: Peephole display, or scrolling with the webcam?
 

I'm working with OpenCV right now --- relatively hard to discover, and therefore linked here:

http://opencvlibrary.sourceforge.net/

Real-time open-source computer vision. Seems like what we want.

Re: Peephole display, or scrolling with the webcam?
 

I've recorded some sample clips with mencoder on the n800. Playing them back in mplayer with the vismv option it appears that the motion vectors could be easily aggregated into a single scrolling motion. It would be nice to put the omap's mpeg encoder to use for tracking motion, but I'm not holding my breath. The other sticky issue is "how do we scroll opera?"

Re: Peephole display, or scrolling with the webcam?
 

Wouldn't it be possible to turn down the resolution of encoding? Or would it be more processor-economic to directly manipulate the RAW camera data?