Streaming Webcam

Yep… Less time than that – scheduled for 4/11, last I heard. They say it’ll support scanning with any camera, but I’ve been running the Insider Preview and haven’t seen any signs this “any camera” deal, personally.

I haven’t played with it specifically. I have a Kinect which works fine. BTW, the manufacturers of the Kinect sell it on its own at a cheaper price than the Microsoft version.

PrimeSense originally made the Kinect, but they got bought by Apple. Did you mean the Occipital Structure Sensor? According to Wikipedia they’re about the only other manufacturer I can see, and their website lists it for $349 USD without a bracket. I can get an actual Kinect V2 and USB kit for $190 CAD.

One of the guys in my 3D printing gang got a PrimeSense but it was a couple of years ago. When did Apple buy them? Guess that makes Alibaba the only cheap source now :slightly_frowning_face:

Oh God… end of 2013, according to Wikipedia. Perhaps not too coincidentally, no more than six months later Microsoft stopped bundling the Kinect with the Xbox One – part poor consumer interest, part protecting their business interests – disentangling Kinect from Xbox One in case Apple decided to get really nasty, no doubt.

  • PrimeSense-chipset cameras are the only participants in the “OpenNI” project.
  • Jerks: Apple registered the domain “openni.org”, which redirects to apple.com.
  • Intel has their RealSense cameras, but they’re not compatible with Primesense cameras. Intel RealSense is supported by the libRealSense library. The older RealSense R200 was as low as $99 in SDK devkit form without a case from the Intel Click website, but it’s EOL and upgraded to the 300 series. The SDK includes a scanning app of their own.
  • The Razer Stargazer and Creative BlasterX Senz3D are Intel RealSense 300-series cameras.
  • The SDK versions of the RealSense cameras have much higher indoor IR distances - hence the higher price. The webcam versions only have a range of around 1.5m. (Intel Sales Q&A)
  • Intel already has the 400 series announced – and it has an incredible 60 meter IR depth field. Scary. https://youtu.be/pvXJSn22ujU
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sure, but i think there’s no need to be that dismissive; it’s not a shipping product yet.

regardless, just pointing out that there are some interesting up and coming options.

honestly were i you @takitus i’d buy a couple of the mevo cameras and get good at using the innovative software multi-angle-from-single-camera features - one in front and one above, done right, could probably get a lot of what you’re looking for.

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Use an old cellphone.
Personally I use my old ones for live security feeds at my house.

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They look cool, but I’m not really looking to spend that much. I’ve got 5+ machines I want to have covered and streaming, which comes out to $2k with mevos. If I were filming a show or something I might be able to justify that, but this is just so people can see what my army of CNC machines are doing.

@Tom_A I recycle/sell/donate all my old cell phones =/. I also want to be able to manage these from the same place/code base etc.

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ahh, yeah, that’s something entirely different. honestly, if you can get these on sale:

https://www.microsoft.com/accessories/en-us/products/webcams/lifecam-studio/q2f-00013

i’ve been using one for years - but it’s probably nicer than you need for this, and not worth paying the $100 for it.

anything that’s microsoft or logitech branded and has hardware encoding (assuming you hook everything up to a single machine, anyway) and autofocus will do everything you need. you really don’t need above 720p to get a really watchable stream with enough detail to satisfy (especially on mobile).

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requires a computer to hook to. =(. needing IP cams

man i’m 0 for 3, clearly not paying attention today.

okay okay, how about this:

that listing is out of stock but i’m sure you can find them somewhere. i think it’s basically impossible to beat for the price; i’m just not sure to what extent you can stream to more than one person (i feel like it’s just an ip cam you can capture and use something else to stream?).

I bookmarked the Intel RealSense site before they were shipping dev kits. But then never got around to ordering one. Any experience with one? The reason it’s on the eventually list is I’m looking for identifying and controlling tiny things without needing custom lenses to start. From the original specs I remember that wasn’t promising.

Stock firmware on those requires a phone app (he didn’t want that), and it uploads everything to their cloud service (evil).

Apparently you can hack them (there’s a github project on doing so), but… well, it’s a hack. Buyer beware.

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Not sure what you mean by this:

It’s a webcam. It doesn’t need custom lenses in any manner. If you mean macro lenses for very small things, then it’s not designed to have additional lenses attached if that’s what you mean. It projects an infrared mesh onto the field of view, and adding additional unaligned lenses would distort the field to such a degree to render it fairly useless.

sure, but i’m guessing he’s the type not afraid of a hack, and at the price i don’t think it’s much of a complaint - getting something that doesn’t require a hack in any way is gonna cost more in my experience haha

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Tots. Hell, if they have it working with 1080p (the lowest I personally can tolerate) and a good, clear, wide FOV*. I read about those cameras before the hack was available, I might even pick up a few just to try out! Thanks for reminding me! :slight_smile:

(*) You really want a decent field of view… some I’ve seen are really narrow, which is useless and needs panning all the time.

9_9

Sorry, I didn’t mean custom lenses for the Intel RealSense dev kit (or system.) I’m looking for something off the shelf that can identify small objects and doesn’t cost that much. I was hoping maybe Intel had gone micro with their dev kits instead of macro. Until this post (it was all Marketing babble last time I looked) I wasn’t sure if they were using an IR mesh or visible light. I’m thinking I need visible light anyway. Oh well.

I’ve done it before (almost a decade ago now) but that was on a corporate project with a budget, multiple people, etc… We used a low res, B&W sensor and custom lens. I have a potential personal project in a totally unrelated field without the budget or human resources. Last time I investigated it looked like anything cheap with an SDK was for facial or body recognition.

Take a look at the HP 3D Structured Light Scanner technology. It does sub-millimeter resolution and uses visible rather than IR light.

Can’t vouch for it though, as I never used it. First time I saw it was several years ago on whatever they called their scanner terminals (an all-in-one PC with built-in overhead mounted version of it), and it was several thousand dollars.

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Thank you. Several thousand is okay for implementation, but not for “I wonder if this is what I need.” I’ll check it out.

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