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What Can the DK2 IR Camera See?

InteriorD
Honored Guest
Hello OculusVR,

I'm a DK2 owner who would like to know what sort of images the DK2 camera could see. A picture of what the DK2 can 'see' would be super helpful. This is for security purposes. I'm sure we would all feel a bit more secure if we know for a fact that the DK2 camera can't see the pudgy/scrawny/well-toned bodies under our clothing while we're standing around with our mouths agape.

On a side note, I'm trying to strap the Leap Motion Controller onto the DK2 but despite listening to the community's advice, I'm unable to locate the IR light emitters on the DK2. It would be very helpful if you can let me know where they are so I won't obstruct it.

Thanks in advance.
105 REPLIES 105

achachi
Honored Guest
Open up you're webcam and look at it through that. you'll see the Ir emitters lit up.

But you do make a good point about privacy, I'm sure someone from Oculus could clear it up, because I guess they don't want to build an archive of us in our underwear and flabby waistlines. There's one or two with the body of an Adonis , me included ;), that might tickle their fancy, but I would prefer to be in the knowledge that camera data is not being transferred away from the computer.

InteriorD
Honored Guest
"achachi" wrote:
Open up you're webcam and look at it through that. you'll see the Ir emitters lit up.


I don't have a webcam... the only cameras I have are the ones on my iPad and iPhone

Dreamwriter
Rising Star
It can only see light sources, nothing else, otherwise it would be useless. It needs to track the position of the IR lights it sees, and for that to be fast and simple, it should only see them as white dots. Anything else and it would have to interpret the entire scene, which would require heavy computational power and tricky programming. The Wii Remote does the exact same thing (that's how it senses where you are pointing it/if you are moving it towards/away from the screen), and its calibration screen actually shows what it sees, it translates every light source into white dots of varying sizes based on brightness.

DeVisioN
Honored Guest
Total speculation on my side, but anyways.

I think raw camera output is something like this, but with a bit more points.


To keep latency down, Oculus devs most likely moved a lot of image filtering to the camera, so only needed and relevant info goes down the cable. There shouldn't be any real images going to the rendering pipe.

About IR emitters on DK2:


See those white dots? These are IR emitters, but on final DK2 version they are covered for aesthetic and protective purposes.

EDIT: off-topic, but how do you resize images in the post?
Think about today and tomorrow. There is nothing you can do about the past.

InteriorD
Honored Guest
"DeVisioN" wrote:
Total speculation on my side, but anyways.

I think raw camera output is something like this, but with a bit more points.


To keep latency down, Oculus devs most likely moved a lot of image filtering to the camera, so only needed and relevant info goes down the cable. There shouldn't be any real images going to the rendering pipe.

About IR emitters on DK2:


See those white dots? These are IR emitters, but on final DK2 version they are covered for aesthetic and protective purposes.

EDIT: off-topic, but how do you resize images in the post?


Thanks for the detailed reply. I'm wondering more about the potential ability of the camera rather than what it's used for. I'm probably just being unnecessarily paranoid though.

I don't know how to resize images, sorry.

Dragonbait
Explorer
It's an infrared camera, all it can see are infrared light sources.
If you look at the photos you will see it doesn't even have a clear lens on the front, it has an opaque white cover specifically to prevent visible light (other than IR) getting through.
DeVisions photo from the Wii setup is exactly what this camera sees.

bp2008
Protege
I'm also sure it is just like the wii's camera, although perhaps higher resolution so it can be more precise. The goal of this camera was to obtain low latency, high reliability tracking data, and that means they want a black frame with little light dots that they can easily and reliably track. So most likely the camera has filters to block all light wavelengths except that which the LEDs on the DK2 use (which is most likely 850nm as it is outside the spectrum of human-visible light, yet most camera sensors are still fairly sensitive to this). Even then, sunlight includes a lot of infrared at this wavelength, and I'm sure they accommodated for this by increasing the shutter speed and reducing sensitivity to minimize the effect of this light pollution.

So in the end, the camera most likely is tuned so that it sees only the LEDs on the DK2, and as little else as possible.

menione
Honored Guest
I too would like confirmation on this. I could imagine that if your system got hacked that the hacker could potentially gain access to all hardware, including the use of the camera. So it would be nice to get confirmation of what the camera is capable of doing.

InteriorD
Honored Guest
"dragonbait" wrote:
It's an infrared camera, all it can see are infrared light sources.
If you look at the photos you will see it doesn't even have a clear lens on the front, it has an opaque white cover specifically to prevent visible light (other than IR) getting through.
DeVisions photo from the Wii setup is exactly what this camera sees.


I'm aware of that since I sit in front of it all day and it's always pointed at me. The "cover" you're talking about is the semi-translucent reflective coating (I can faintly make out what's behind the coating). The wavelengths of the visible spectrum should be able to reach the sensor in decent quantities since there's a stronger light source in front of the coating than behind it.

Whether or not the camera can make use of this input is what I'm trying to figure out in this thread.

Infrared is right next to the visible spectrum. Because of that, even without an infrared-specific light source, everything we can see should be visible to an infrared camera under regular light (maybe with a lot of blooming, but still visible none-the-less). The DK2 camera's threshold for filtering might have been set artificially high for low-latency when processing the input, but that doesn't mean that the camera is unable to "see" with some degree of normality.


"menione" wrote:
I too would like confirmation on this. I could imagine that if your system got hacked that the hacker could potentially gain access to all hardware, including the use of the camera. So it would be nice to get confirmation of what the camera is capable of doing.


This is what I'm worried about. I know for a fact that there are hackers out there capable of accessing hardware such as microphones and webcams, and that they're also capable of disconnecting the indicator light from activation.

Edit: Massive rework of post for grammar/legibility. Consider this v2.0