Progress on the hardware side of things is slowly moving forward! As of this week, a nearly complete second prototype of our table has been produced (and will be detailed in the near future, I promise!). Physically speaking, it’s nearly complete. What’s left is the ancient tribal voodoo involved in making the projector and camera play nice with the new digs.

Getting a camera to do am adequate job of capturing our diffuse infrared light has been a nightmare. The loaner Sony TRV22, while a reasonably featured product, does not offer non-interlaced output and runs on non-square pixels. As interlacing tears a fiducial into many smaller components, this is simply not workable and looks to be unfixable. Other HDcams are being investigated, but carry a cost far beyond any reasonable budget this team could afford. Cheap webcams are often the product of interest for this field, but they fail to offer the resolution and framerate necessary to get the job done.

Enter the “Sony Playstation 3 Eye,” a cheap USB camera designed to extend the functionality of its parent console by giving it a new range of audio and video inputs to work with. All of that is basically unnecessary, though. What matters is that a very talented someone, AlexP, has managed to write a comprehensive driver set providing full support for this device on the Windows platform. Unfortunately for us, the host of this file is MIA with no sign of returning in the near future. If anyone viewing this happens to know where a copy of the latest version can be found (or simply has one archived somewhere), a reply in the comments would be appreciated.

While the camera continues to be a point of trouble, it is far from our only hickup. Projector Limbo has hit the project. While our existing projector, an NEC WT-615, is remarkably functional and a solid performer, its reflected mirror configuration does not suit our light path. If we stick with it, the table will need to be widened by nearly a foot and a half just to allow it to fit, and the nature of this light makes folding the optics somewhat difficult. A new option must be found soon. A detailed list of options will soon be posted up for some text-based brainstorming.

That’s it for now, folks. I’ll follow up on this soon enough with a much more detailed post when time allows. Keep your eyes peeled!