Nimble Sense time-of-flight 3D camera brings hands into VR

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rywang
One Eyed Hopeful
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Joined: Sat Oct 25, 2014 6:25 pm

Nimble Sense time-of-flight 3D camera brings hands into VR

Post by rywang »

Hi all,

We're building a time of flight depth sensing camera specifically for virtual reality hand-tracking and input. We just launched the project on Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ni ... al-reality

The camera will capture a 3D point cloud across a 110 degree field of view and at a range of 10-70 cm. We're combining this with the world's most robust skeletal hand tracking software to bring hands into VR for input.

Here's a video of how you might use this input in games like Spectre, Technolust and Ethereon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6EPo65Yvwg

Looking for feedback and your support!

Thanks!
Rob
Endothermic
Binocular Vision CONFIRMED!
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Re: Nimble Sense time-of-flight 3D camera brings hands into

Post by Endothermic »

If you designed the camera from the ground up why did you make it only 45Hz, isn't that a little low?
MSat
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Re: Nimble Sense time-of-flight 3D camera brings hands into

Post by MSat »

Endothermic wrote:If you designed the camera from the ground up why did you make it only 45Hz, isn't that a little low?
"from the ground up" using a ToF sensor from pmd technologies, so the refresh might possibly be limited due to that.
MSat
Golden Eyed Wiseman! (or woman!)
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Re: Nimble Sense time-of-flight 3D camera brings hands into

Post by MSat »

Hmm... according to pmd's site, the sensor is 19,200 pixels, and the readout clock is up to 15 megalpixels, so if it can actually sense at that rate, that should provide ~780fps...
rywang
One Eyed Hopeful
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Joined: Sat Oct 25, 2014 6:25 pm

Re: Nimble Sense time-of-flight 3D camera brings hands into

Post by rywang »

We're designing a new camera module for VR, but you're right that we're using an existing ToF chip from Infineon / pmdtechnologies. 45 Hz is all we can promise right now given the progress on our current hardware revision, but you're right that a higher frame-rate could be achieved in theory, even over USB2. There are a lot of factors influencing the frame-rate, including the brightness of the laser, the exposure time of the camera, the heat of the laser, etc. Hopefully, we'll have better numbers to report when we get our next hardware revision, but we don't want to over-promise!
MSat
Golden Eyed Wiseman! (or woman!)
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Re: Nimble Sense time-of-flight 3D camera brings hands into

Post by MSat »

It does seem pretty cool, and the DK2 clip is pretty darn clever. Good luck on the kickstarter :)
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