Search YouTube to for ‘PS3 Eye infrared’ for some examples on how to hack the camera.
It turns out that the PS3 Eye was just barely easy enough for hackers to crack open and remove the IR filter, thus making it an IR imager. Some people can remember that you could see infrared on early cellphones through their cameras that’s because the manufacturers didn’t include IR filters on the cellphone cameras. You also probably know that most of the camera imagers have an infrared filter placed over them. If you know about imaging sensors in webcams, you probably know that the sensor itself can sense infrared. But PS3 Eye cameras don’t detect infrared out of the box. At the time, PS3 Eyes were selling for about $40 USD, the advantage of mass production. These frame rates are 60 fps at 640×480 and up to 125 fps at 320×240. The PS3 Eye was built for Computer Vision (CV) applications, and performs well in variable lighting, has relatively low latency USB performance, and is capable of high frame rates. The Point Grey cameras were great, they were fast, but they were beyond the reach of the average DIYer.Įnter the PlayStation 3 Eye Camera. Microsoft’s PixelSense tables use this technology.Īt the time, “inexpensive” infrared ( IR) cameras were several hundred dollars made by manufacturers such as Point Grey. When the sheet is touched by the user the deformation results in leakage of infrared light, which peaks at the points of maximum pressure indicating the user’s touch location. Objects placed on the sheet are detectable by the cameras. The edges of the acrylic sheet are illuminated by infrared LEDs, and infrared cameras are focused on the back of the sheet. Infrared acrylic projection: A translucent acrylic sheet is used as a rear projection screen to display information. Why the PS3 Eye be good and people use itīack around 2007-2008, there were a lot of people working on multi-touch surfaces, including open source groups such as the NUI Group. The driver will only work with that release. The repository includes a driver compiled for LT4 21.2. You can find the scripts on Github: installPlayStation3Eye Note: If you have the Grinch kernel installed, you already have PS3 Eye goodness and don’t need to do this installation. Installation was done after a fresh JetPack install.
Here’s a video on how to install the driver and get them running on the Jetson. I happened to have several of them lying about from past projects. Several years ago, the Sony PlayStation 3 Eye webcam was the staple of DIY Computer Vision projects.